‘Sugar Babies’ Makes Whoopee in London

Burlesque may be dead, but they can’t stamp out “Sugar Babies.” Now it has cropped up in London, starring, as of yore, Ann Miller and Mickey Rooney.

The Pittsburgh jokes are now Manchester jokes, but their general direction is the same. “Take off your clothes, my dear.” “Where shall I put them, doctor?” “Over there--on top of mine.”

Anyone who thinks that the British public is too refined for this sort of thing has forgotten Benny Hill and the “Carry On” comedies. But what would the critics think?

Some of them screamed with laughter, some of them howled with pain and everybody had fun writing about it.

Michael Billington of the Guardian: “To a theater paralyzed with good taste, it brings the reverberating rudeness of the whoopee cushion.”

Punch’s Sheridan Morley: “What is so appalling is its assumption that mindbendingly awful routines acquire fascination through age.”

Jim Hiley of the Listener: “Imitates with drooling precision the real thing. Ann Miller’s big notes sound like something being minced alive.”

The Jewish Chronicle’s David Nathan: “Mickey Rooney energetically embodies the theme that short, bald old men lust after tall young women. There is a grain of truth in this.”

The Financial Times’ Michael Coveney: “It opened on Broadway in 1979, it looks like 1909, sounds like 1809 and has gags as old as 1509.”

The Sunday Telegraph’s Francis King: “Like Chinese thousand-year eggs, there are jokes so ancient and rotten that connoisseurs eventually come to relish them. Such are the jokes here.”

Everybody agreed that it was silly to Anglicize the show, all Brits having been brought up on American movies; and that Michael Davis’ jumping-juggler act was hilarious. “Seven balls in the air at once . . . nine, actually.”

Exiled Soviet director Yuri Lyubimov will return to Moscow in January to direct two plays at his old theater, the Taganka.

Novosti, a Soviet news agency, said that Lyubimov will direct an adaptation of a Dostoevsky novel, probably “The Possessed,” and a play from the 1960s, Boris Mozhayev’s “Alive.”

Lyubimov has been directing in the West since he was made a non-citizen in 1984, just before Michael S. Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost went into effect.

“Some people think life here is like heaven,” Lyubimov said from Stockholm, where he is directing “The Master and Marguerita.” “I’ll put it bluntly--to live a normal life, without any luxuries, a director should make at least four plays a year, in good theaters. You have to work very, very hard.”

“42nd Street” has posted its closing notice on Broadway. Does this mean that producer David Merrick has scrapped his plans for an all-black version? Maybe so, maybe not. “Mr. Merrick is Mr. Merrick,” said the show’s publicist. “All we know is that the cast has been told we’re closing Jan. 8.”

QUOTE OF THE WEEK: From “Sugar Babies”--SHE: “What do you want for Christmas?” HE: “Surprise me.” SHE: “The children aren’t yours.”