The Theater: New Musical in Manhattan, Nov. 18, 1957

Rumple (book by Irving Phillips; music and lyrics by Ernest G. Schweikert and Frank Reardon) has just one real asset: Eddie Foy. He has the twin gifts of perfect stage presence and quiet audience courtship, the jaunty, pinpointed song-and-dance-man skill of the vaudeville era. He knows every last little hop, skip and jump, and nudge, bop and scram; he is master of the soft shoe, the dead pan, the faraway smile. As Rumple, a newspaper-cartoon character in danger of extinction because his creator has lost the power to portray him, he fights for survival with tactics that happily are more Foy...

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