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The chronicle of Molly Brown's society tumbles at home and her triumphs among the titled abroad is not only made the crude Maggie and Jiggs stuff it may often have been but is given an unvarying funny-paper treatment. The show, too, has an altogether loose-leaf structure, while the Meredith Willson score is not up to The Music Man's and has nothing as infectious as Seventy-Six Trombones. But it gives a kind of joyous blare to the evening; along the way there is some nice dancing, rowdy in Leadville, chic in Monte Carlo; there are some funny remarks; and from time to time, there is some funny business.
But what plainly just keeps The Unsinkable Molly Brown afloat is an unquenchable Tammy Grimes. Starting off, in potato-sack finery, half tomboy and half troll, she roars and soars ahead with her magically rusty vocal cords, her magically uncombed look, her meltable rock-candy hardness, now executing a slow, sneakered, ragamuffin saraband, now after a Denver fiasco ripping into an exuberant barefoot dance, now smashing a chair over a stranger's head, now reacting in Paris to her first taste of snails: "With that sauce, you could eat erasers." Thanks to her, Molly is dripping but undrowned.