Sometimes a Show with all the ingredients for a smash hit never gets to Broadway. Last season's most extravagant example of this cold, hard fact was a plush Ziegfeld Follies starring Tallulah Bankhead and featuring Carol (Pajama Game) Haney, Joan (Kismet) Diener, dances by Jack Cole, sets and costumes by Raoul Pene Dubois and scads of stunning showgirls. Suffering "financial problems" during out-of-town tryouts, the Follies closed in Philadelphia on May 12 without even making a bow on the Great White Way, causing Miss Bankhead much embarrassment and paving the way for a satire in this year's New Faces: descending a long staircase in true Ziegfeld fashion, a mock-Tallulah in the person of deft mimic T. C. Jones kept walking down, down, right into the black oblivion of a trapdoor.
Next year, Bea Lillie may step into the Bankhead brogans in a Follies which, say the new producers, "will not, in the main, resemble the one that failed to appear last season."
Waxing wacky in her ill-fated Follies, Tallulah ribs the Faustian Damn Yankees in a parody titled The Year that Goethe Copped the Pennant.
The phantom Follies was loaded with beautiful girls and fine talent. Ogling from left to right, we see a formally-attired Carol Haney; an almost-attired Julie Newmar, exotic showgirl in the great Ziegfeld tradition; and an exuberant high point from the number called The Thing About Willie, sung and danced by Beryl Towbin and Don Crichton. Other sketches and songs were contributed by stagewise pros like Ronnie Graham and Irving Berlin. To our right, on the facing page, a familiar opener "glorifying," in Ziegfeld's words, "the American girl."
The phantom Follies was loaded with beautiful girls and fine talent. Ogling from left to right, we see a formally-attired Carol Haney; an almost-attired Julie Newmar, exotic showgirl in the great Ziegfeld tradition; and an exuberant high point from the number called The Thing About Willie, sung and danced by Beryl Towbin and Don Crichton. Other sketches and songs were contributed by stagewise pros like Ronnie Graham and Irving Berlin. To our right, on the facing page, a familiar opener "glorifying," in Ziegfeld's words, "the American girl."
The phantom Follies was loaded with beautiful girls and fine talent. Ogling from left to right, we see a formally-attired Carol Haney; an almost-attired Julie Newmar, exotic showgirl in the great Ziegfeld tradition; and an exuberant high point from the number called The Thing About Willie, sung and danced by Beryl Towbin and Don Crichton. Other sketches and songs were contributed by stagewise pros like Ronnie Graham and Irving Berlin. To our right, on the facing page, a familiar opener "glorifying," in Ziegfeld's words, "the American girl."
At left, sultry Julie Newmar gives her hard-working navel a rest in her dressing-room.
Above: David Burns, veteran character actor and comic of stage and screen, lamps a couple of deep-breathing belles with the appreciative eyebone of the connoisseur.
Below: boys and girls together cut up backstage between curtains.
Below: boys and girls together cut up backstage between curtains.
