Strike Me Pink (words, music & production by Lew Brown & Ray Henderson) had its premiere in the null manner. Opening night tickets were printed in pink & gilt. There were pink roses for the ladies, pink carnations for the gentlemen. Even in such an atmosphere of anti-Depression bravado, one might have expected a bank moratorium audience to be unresponsive. Such was not the case. With Wartime cheeriness, first-nighters rewarded an optimistic but routine number called "It's Great to Be Alive," sung by dark little Gracie Barrie, with a storm of applause. When the tall and attractive chorus chanted "Roosevelt Is President" in the Of Thee I Sing manner, there was a ringing ovation.
Potato-nosed Jimmy Durante, the living composite of Manhattan cab drivers, did not have to work hard for his laughs. Covered with characteristic confusion, Funnyman Durante finds himself trying to climb over the orchestra pit to assert his identity when an impostor is introduced on stage in the second scene. He appears to be, as usual, utterly unable to control his feelings. He shakes his parrotlike head, hurls his hat at the band, indulges his ignorant fondness for British idioms, tells the old one about the floorwalker who thought he was about to be kicked by the dog, sings snatches of his famed night-club songs, "Data," "I Can Do Without Broadway," "Jimmy the Well-Dressed Man.',' Mr. Durante feels that the crowning indignity heaped upon him in this show is his being made to appear, finally, in a full-dress suit. "Am I mor-ti-fied!" he cries. "Brown & Henderson, he made me do it. I feel like a magician!"
Self-sufficient Hope Williams is called upon to insert the Park Avenue element into the proceedings. As in The New Yorkers, in which she was also associated with uncouth Mr. Durante, she does not have much to do except feed him a few lines. Lively Lupe Velez, having abandoned most of the Mexican accent she affected in Ziegfeld's Hot-Cha, spends most of her time shaking herself at Funnyman Durante, which calls forth from him the bitter remark: "Now they're makin' me a juvenile!"
Theme-song of Strike Me Pink is as exhilarating a fox-trot as the team of Brown & Henderson has turned out for some years:
Strike me pink if I don't think
I'm jailing in love!
Strike me blue if I don't think
It's you . . .
Hal Le Roy of the spidery legs does some excellent eccentric dancing. Johnny Downs, the real juvenile, sings and dances ably. Other good tunes: "Let's Call It a Day," "Memories."
Both Your Houses (by Maxwell Anderson; Theatre Guild, producer) is high propagandist art. Playwright Anderson (Saturday's Children, Elizabeth the Queen) bases his tract on an heroic premise : that all save one of the nation's 435 Congressmen are crooked. The honest one is a young school-teacher from Nevada named Allan McClean (Shepperd Strudwick), junior member of the House Appropriations Committee.