Happy as a King. By Austin Melford and Fred Emney.
Music and lyrics by Ross Parker. (Princes.)
AMERICAN musical comedies are better than British ones and have been for several decades : nobody questions that. The argument starts when somebody asks why the home-grown " musical " is so inferior. Happy ai a Kin shows symptoms from which a diagnosis might be made. It has vigorous, undistinguished dancing stamped by the drill-servant rather than the choreographer. The costumes are in shades of red, scarlet and pink, bravely matched with light blue. The jokes are part of folk history rather than stage dialogue. Some of the players stumble over their lines ; others cannot help laughing at Mr. Emney. The stage hands appear to be playing deck-tennis with cannon balls during the scene-changes. Everything that could be wrong, inferior and cheap is wrong, inferior and cheap. In such a framework the energetic talents of Greta Unger, Shani Wallis and Eve Lister can make little impression, and Fred Emney gets laughs only because he looks so funny. His lines, like so much else in the
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