The Theater: New Musical in Manhattan, Feb. 7, 1944

Mexican Hayride (book by Herbert & Dorothy Fields; music & lyrics by Cole Porter; produced by Michael Todd) is a $225,000 tropical splurge. Better musicomedies have been swung on far less money, but Mexican Hayride is a smooth formula job — large-scale and lavish, with good dancing, fair tunes, pleasant people and plenty of Bobby Clark fun.

Zany Clark, of the sudden grrrr, the steady leer, the carousel-horse lope, is cast as a numbers racketeer hiding out from the FBI in Mexico. Pursuit of that fine fiction drives him into some startling new disguises. As a strolling musician he flutes and frolics; as a bucktoothed Indian squaw (see cut) he joins in a happy warble, Count Your Blessings:

You’ll forget you had the dropsy

When they finish your autopsy ∙ ∙ ∙

You’ll be happier when you own a

Pretty pickled pine kimona,

So count your blessings and smile.*

Second-fiddling the fun is pert, legsome June Havoc (Pal Joey), cast as a lady bullfighter from the States, and given to such rhymed ruefulness as:

There’s a boy moose for ev’ry girl moose,

There’s a boy goose for ev’ry girl goose,

There’s a papoose for ev’ry ma-moose,

So there must be someone for me.*

In general, Composer Porter has relied on comic ditties instead of trying to dazzle the customers with languorous Latin rhythms. But out of a pleasantly unexciting score emerges one fetching, early-Porterish tune, I Love You. The dancing, too, is Main Stem rather than Mexican—fast routines and catchy specialties. The sets are vivid, the costumes showy. Killjoy on the hayride is the book, which for a while is a worse threat than the FBI.

* By permission of the copyright owners, Chappell & Co.