,4 Rainbow Square." (Stoll Theatre.) TIIE square is impressive and
atmospheric ; and the rainbow at the end is delightful. But beyond the pleasures of its title, the new musical show is a sadly bankrupt affair. The songs arc dimly reminiscent of other songs which, after long years, one had finally succeeded in forgetting ; the book—jammed staccato into the orchestral tacits—is a melodramatic folly about counterfeiters in post-war Vienna ; and the comedians dart breathlessly through a classic rogues' gallery of bad jokes—including a reference to " those Volga nights on the Volga." The Stoll Theatre has become, in fact, a burial-ground for a uniquely humourless and unmelodious mammoth. The sky—and Mr. Robert Nesbitt's lighting of it—are the real heroes—cave-grey at dawn, pink-gashed and freaked with jet at sunset, and clammily swollen at storm-tide. Few musicals can ever have been better lit.
The rest, I am afraid, is noise—articulated by, among others, Miss Gloria Lane (the secretary in The Consul), squandered on the part of a street-walking ex-actress ; Mr. Sonnie Hale, busy and beady- eyed, as a Viennese busker ; Miss Vera Pearce; as a circus pro- prietress ; and Mr. Alfred Marks (who is twice funny) as her barker. Meanwhile, in the bottom right-hand and left-hand corners of the stage, two ambitious character performances are going on—by Mr. Ivan Staff (a philosophic waiter) and Mr. Andrea Malandrinos (a shady printer), who respectively sidle and skid into sight, act devotedly, and contrapuntally depart. To Mr. Malandrinos falls one line of quite magnificent strangeness. Taxed by his chief, a notorious forger, with having hidden the engraving plates in an apparently inaccessible belfry, he replies: " Ah—but there is a hole at the back of the tower where you can get in." It is just such
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