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The Show Is On ("conceived" by Vincente Minnelli; Shuberts, producers) is the sort of thing youthful Conceiver Minnelli must have dreamed of doing when he was indefatigably designing costumes and painting sets for the ponderous weekly stage shows at Manhattan's giant Radio City Music Hall. The Show Is On is a superior sequel to his At Home Abroad (TIME, Sept. 30, 1935). In it Mr. Minnelli has the nation's eight greatest show-song writing teams working for him. Spectators are still trying to remember how the Rodgers & Hart tune goes when the band begins playing an even better one by George & Ira Gershwin. There is Gracie Barrie to keep the good songs ringing clear, Buxom Mitzi Mayfair to strut the hot numbers, Paul Haakon to leap through the smooth ones. There is Bert Lahr, the most emphatic comedian on the revue stage, as a noisy Hollywood actor trying to chisel out of paying his income tax and as an over-manly baritone in a hickory shirt bellowing, "What do you chop when you chop a tree!" while occasionally getting an untimely handful of chips thrown in his face from the wings.
The aforementioned performers could carry a Grade B musical show by themselves. What puts The Show Is On definitely in the Grade A class is the addi tion of another pair of entertainers, Reginald Gardiner and Beatrice Lillie.
Actor Gardiner last year conquered Broadway by imitating—with a few simple but compelling gestures, an appropriate word or sound and the expression of his amazingly mobile face—such improbable objects as a French train, a dirigible, ugly wall paper. To these sensitively communicated ideographs, Mimic Gardiner has now added a lighthouse (by revolving his body and then suddenly opening his eyes and mouth very wide and hissing slightly when he faces the audience) and a buoy (by crouching, wobbling drunkenly, looking seasick and giving off a bilious bell sound).
Actress Lillie's cool impersonations of women in various outrageous situations are probably employed to greater effect in this show than in any other in her long and hilarious professional lifetime. Any Lillie fan who misses her splendid pre-War number. "Buy Yourself A Balloon," sung while uncomfortably suspended over the audience in an electrically lighted quarter-moon, will be missing the high point of this comedienne's career. She is also pretty funny as a noisy first nighter, a haughty Theatre Guild box-office clerk, a strip tease artist. Best tunes: Now (Vernon Duke & Ted Fetter), Little Old Lady (Hoagy Carmichael & Stanley Adams).