When a specialized actor is given a specialized role, the one specialty being miles apart from the other, we have a dilemma much the same as that of the famous immovable object and irresistible force. Just how those two settled their difficulty is unknown, but George M. Cohan impersonating Franklin D. Roosevelt presents quite an anomaly. For years Mr. Cohan has pleased his audiences by playing the soft-hearted, slightly baffled middle-aged man so accurately described by "Dear Old Daddy," the name of his 1935 offering. He makes no change in his ways in the current piece. And so we find the vigorous charm of the President turned into fuzzy sentimentality. That certainly isn't imitation, nor is it satire.

George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart wrote the book; Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart wrote the songs. Nevertheless, the combination seems sadly uninspired. "Of Thee I Sing" should have remained a final expression; "I'd Rather Be Right" has very little to add to the former's artistic trenchaney. The new work is a highly specific representation of the present administration, with ridicule hurled at everybody in it. Jim Farley, Henry Morgenthau, and Madame Secretary Perkins are undoubtedly fit subjects for the lampooner's art, and the caricatures of them are skillfully drawn. But the President is scarcely touched when an entirely different person walks about more or less in his likeness, although the making him out as a happy-go-lucky experimenter does strike close to home. Horse-laughs evoked at the expense of Cordell Hull and Chief Justice Hughes, the one docked out as an idiotic jester and the other as a dwarfish lecher, don't deserve to be called even crude. Mr. Kaufman should have seen that some people are not subject to ridicule, and that entire has to be appropriate. Depicting the Supreme Court, moreever, as a gang of brainless no-men, takes most of the sting out of the satire thrown at the Executive. The audience in divided between laughing at the Now Deal and sympathizing with it. To these charges of indiscrimination and inconsistency must be added the guilt of that increasingly-popular dramatic fallacy: accusing the munitions-makers of being the chief cause of war.

There are, to be sure, some very effective bits. The discussion of taking gold out of a hole in Brazil and putting it into a hole in Kentucky, and the wild attempts to assign a purpose to the operation, are rather trenchant, and the song "Off the Record" is a very clever assortment of Presidential confessions. Taylor Holmes, besides giving an excellent performance as Secretary of the Treasury, does as especially good job of singing "A Baby Bond." Even the songs, however, are not up to expectation, the only really tuneful one being "Have You Met Miss Jones?" In short, better things should be in store for us from so expert a crew.