Redhead, the happy-go-lustiest musical in town, is a valentine, lovingly inscribed in song and dance, to a redheaded refreshment named Gwen Verdon, currently the first lady of Broadway musical comedy. She is equally adept at both prat-falls and pathos. She can sing, she can act, she can dance. It is only fair to say that there is an element of whodunit in the whacky plot, but there is no mystery about what happens to our heroine when she gets herself a job in a music hall and starts dancing. Given a dozen changes of costume in Ter-Arutunian's Hogarthian sets, Gwen dances everything from Swan Lake to Yankee Doodle Dandy. Richard Kiley does fine as a hero and the Dorothy Fields-Albert Hague score gives Kiley a chance to discover that Verdon's "posterior is so superior." Director-choreographer Bob Fosse awards the redhead the best of everything and, because incredibly and indefatigably she is on stage almost all the livelong time, you won't mind the divagations in the plot. For posterity, let us say that Miss Verdon's superiority is not limited to her posteriority. At the 46th Street Theatre, 226 West 46th, NYC.
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If the prospect of a folksy family play centering on Negro housing problems and done up in old-fashioned, unexperimental three-act form without flashbacks, monologs, blank verse or other frills strikes you as a yawny evening of theatre, you'll be glad to learn that Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun (which answers the above description) is a smashing show that kept us immovably mucilaged to our seats. Sidney Poitier (Playboy, On the Scene, April '59) plays ambitious familyman Walter Lee Younger who passes his days crammed into a small, shabby Chicago South Side flat with his wife, son, sister and matriarchal monolith of a mother. Mom -- played with deep dignity and high humor by nightclub trouper Claudia McNeil -- has $10,000 in insurance money coming to her. Poitier wants a chunk of it to help him start a small business of his own and save him from the humiliation of his yessiring chauffeur job; sis needs another wedge to put her through medical school; mom and wife have their eyes on a house which will mean elbow room and soul room for them all. But 10 grand will only go so far these days, and from this arises the play's chief conflict. The whole cast ranges from superb to eminently adequate, with Poitier providing a free, fresh performance highlighted by flashes of angry fire and heroic despair. The cannily written script is cannily directed by Lloyd Richards, with all the humorous and sentimental landmines exploding in all the right places, just when you want them most. Ralph Alswang's set is a good and practical one in the cutaway mode. At the Ethel Barrymore, 243 West 47th, NYC.
