N. Y. CRITICS EMBRACE ‘ME AND MY GIRL’

Broadway has a new theater and a new hit.

The theater is the Marquis, situated in the new Marriott Hotel on 46th Street. Broadway still mourns the two houses demolished for the hotel, the Morosco and the Helen Hayes, but the new theater impressed the critics as warm, relatively intimate (1,600 seats) and well tuned.

And they loved the show--”Me and My Girl.” The London import (seen at the Music Center in June) struck the press as an endearingly brainless musical, in the tradition of “No, No, Nanette,” but with a British accent. Clive Barnes of the New York Post compared the revival of the 1937 musical to “vintage port.” David Richards of the Washington Post said that it was the kind of piffle that eventually “got a hammerlock on your heart.” The AP’s Michael Kuchwara called it “enchanting.”

The critic everyone was worried about was Frank Rich of the New York Times, who hadn’t much liked the show in London, except for its star Robert Lindsay.

But Rich found the show “sheer happiness” on Times Square--perhaps because its new and largely American supporting cast showed so much more pep and freshness than had their British counterparts.

Everybody loved Lindsay as the Cockney who wakes up to find himself a lord. Without him, wrote the Daily News’ Douglas Watt, “ ‘Me and My Girl’ would be worthless.”

“Bull Pen” may have premiered in Los Angeles (at Theatre/Theater and the Odyssey) but its setting is Fenway Park, Boston. And now it’s playing Boston, to good reviews.

Steve Kluger’s baseball comedy predictably brought out all the baseball metaphors from the local critics--”major-league performances,” “belongs in the win column,” “scores big,” etc.

Point is, they were charmed, even when Kluger seemed to be piling too much philosophical freight onto his tale of life in the Fenway Park bullpen. As Jay Carr of the Boston Globe pointed out, the Red Sox have, in fact, always been the American League’s most existential team.

Carolyn Clay of the Boston Phoenix, a declared non-fan, saw the weaknesses of the story, but liked the pungent dialogue (“the verbal equivalent of tobacco chewing and jock adjusting.”) In this show, she decided, “the bull is mightier than the pen.”

The Fall River, Mass., Herald News’ sports editor, George Darmody, said that he didn’t know anything about plays, except for double plays, but enjoyed this one. “It captures the realism of the baseball world . . . and I don’t know anyone who can’t use a good laugh.”

QUOTE OF THE WEEK. “Me and My Girl’s” producer, James Nederlander, in the New York Times: “I’ve always liked August; particularly when you have a hit.”