Weathering a mediocre first act, "The Red Robe," at the Shubert, gets under way in the second and third, and areas through to a place well up among the "Vagabond kings" and "Student Princes" of historical musical comedy. Its source is "Under the Red Robe," the novel of twenty years ago by Stanley Weyman, and its plot, if you are a stickler about things like that, is so definite as to inspire bold-faced play acting by Cardinal Richelieu, in the person of Jose Ruben. Add his name to the sedentary principals who have dared do their historical atmosphere well, and have gona unapplauded.

Walter Woolf's buoyant masculinity and swordplay carry the show through a somehow familiar tavern scene. After that "The Red Robe" could run along on the magnificent staging of its seventeenth century interiors,s in which Watson Barratt has secured blendings of scenery and costume second only to those in Ames' "Merchant of Venice". But by this time Violet Carlson, yellow-haired and bandy-legged, has started being the only soubrette with a baby voice who was ever funny, and Barnett Parker and Barry Lupino have burlesqued all Flanders hip boots and picture hats out of sight.

The dancing flaunts no stunting stars like the three tall-hatted hoofers in "Hold Everything"; its appeal is therefore the more inexplicable. Marjorie Peterson, as Nanette, leads two choruses in dances of a grace that never needs the musical comedy elbow.

For the most part the music is no more than characteristic, "king of the Sword", "Believe in Me", and "What-ever It Is, I've Got It" are near-exceptions rendered with unction by Walter Woolf, Helen Gilliland and Lupino. The book is an in-and outer. A line drawn from the best of the gags--"Familiarity breeds attempt"--would bisect a line from the worst, which is something about horse and hoarse, somewhere near "Do you believe in the hereafter?.... Well,that's what I'm here after!"