When the Messrs. Berlin, Hart and Sherwood get their heads together on a musical, you'd expect the result to be the highlight of the season. Their collaboration on "Miss Liberty," however, has produced only a better-than-average shown and thus is disappointing. None of Irving Berlin's tunes have the "whistle-appeal" that characterized the music from most of his earlier efforts. The show's lone sentimental number, "Homework," seems like a rehash of any of the drowsky tunes from the Thirties; its lyrics center around a strained similarity between the words "housework" and "homework." "Let's Take an Old Fashioned Walk" is closer to Berlin standards but even it would be three deep on the hit list from the average Berlin musical.

The flaw in Sherwood's plot is that there are two heroines and only one hero. Horace Miller, a young photographer with James G. Bennett's New York Herald in 1885, is the object of affection for both Maisie Dell, a lady-reporter from the Police Gazette, and Miss Liberty herself. By all the traditions of American musical drama, Maisie should be the winner. She waits faithfully in New York while Horace tracks Miss Liberty down in Paris, she talks Bennett into sending money to Horace, she sings "Homework" with tears in her eyes. But somehow the show's namesake wins out and Maisie is left to croon an unconvincing rationalization, "Falling Out of Love Can Be Fun." The Heart of the audience is with both Maisie and Miss Liberty; it is an unsatisfying plot that leaves one of them out in the cold.

The direction and the acting are what make the show better than average. The dance scenes in "Only for Americans" and "The Policeman's Ball" are examples of Hart's splendid direction. Mary McCarthy swaggers delightfully through the role of Maisic; if nothing else, her anatomical proportions fit her uniquely for the job of a Police Gazette reporter. Eddle Albert, as Horace Miller, though not outstanding in general, sings "A Little Fish in a Big Pond" with a fine hoarse staccato. Patricia Hammerlee, the female lead in the ballet troupe, steals nearly every dancing scene with an unusual mastery of comic ballet; the brightest spot in the first act is her routine in the Paris park scene.

As a subject, the story of how the Statue of Liberty came into being is potentially a good one, but the brains behind "Miss Liberty" have worked it out according to a rather dull formula. The show lacks the dramatic and musical sparkle which imprints a great musical in the audience's memory. The Berlin, Hart, Sherwood combine has chosen to use the formula in place of any ingenuity, and the result is mediocrity.