Theatre
End of Season
By ALAN BRIEN The World of Suzie Wong. (Prince of Wales.)—Kooka- burra. (Princes.) Suzie Wong has been reviewed by the rest of the critics almost entirely in puns—which does not leave much opportunity for me to stuff some ancient gags in the mouths of the gaping audience. They all agree that this feeble libretto for a non-existent tunesmith is a mediocre, woman's magazine day- dream. Perhaps it should be added that the whole sickly confection is whipped up with a deft pastrycook's skill and that it obviously goes down like a bombe with saccharine-starved theatre- goers. It is also interesting to note, for those who like interesting notes, that Suzie Wong reveals one new and fairly surprising ingredient in the contemporary formula for middle-brow zabaglione in 1959. As well as the improbable happy ending, the trials of a self-doubting Bohemian artist, the tribulations of a whore with a heart of gold, the vulgarly exotic settings, the boisterously juvenile jokiness to which we have become unhappily inured in this genre, there must, apparently, now be also a careful smatter- ing of defiant smut. If Suzie Wong runs, it will be because it is studded with giggly references to orgasms, love-play, impotence, nymphomania and virginity—the last being the most shocking, and therefore the most laughable, of all the daring nouns.
Kookaburra is allegedly an Australian musical —which is to say that it is the same old, prim, sentimental, amateurish English musical with the addition of a dog, a cream separator and a few `bloodies.' Nobody seems to have any idea how to move about the stage. The action stops, like an incontinent donkey, every ten minutes for a predictable song which zooms out through con- cealed amplifiers. Even potentially good num- bers, like the tea-cup chant of the out-back matrons, get themselves wrapped up in a ju- jitsu muddle because they lack any disciplined direction. Maggie Fitzgibbon, a blonde golliwog with a throaty guffaw, deserves better things— but, then, who doesn't? Mr. Jack Hylton may have been a great clog-dancer. But as a picker of musicals he has the touch of a rhinoceros and the ear of a kookaburra.
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