Leonard Sillman staged his first +New Faces revue on Broadway in 1934; 34 years later came his seventh and final effort, +New Faces of '68. The revue format was practically moribund by then, and it didn't help that the show opened in the midst of national crises that made it seem sillier than it was and even -- that most dreaded of 1960s putdowns -- irrelevant. One month before the opening on May 2, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated. One week before the closing on June 15, the same thing happened to New York Senator Robert F. Kennedy. No wonder the show ran only 52 performances. Who wanted to go to the musical theater at times like that, unless it was to see +Hair? Even in better times, however, +New Faces of '68 might not have had much of a chance, especially if its level of sketch comedy is accurately indicated by "Tango," a series of "believe it or else" one-liners accompanied by Spike Jones-style percussion that didn't offer any competition to the joke-wall on Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In, available for free on TV. As might be expected, the musical selections and the cast of unknowns are wildly uneven. Most of the performers were making their only Broadway appearances, which seems a shame only in the case of Marilyn Child, who affectingly sings the proto-women's lib ballad "Where Is Me?" Of the performers who did go on to other things, Brandon Maggart (later a featured performer in +Applause among other shows) makes the best out of a series of songs using numbers and letters as puns that should have turned up later on Sesame Street; Robert Klein (later the star of +They're Playing Our Song in addition to an extensive career as a comedian) has several funny bits, singing "Love in a New Tempo" (the new tempo being a march) and mugging his way through the parodies "Hullabaloo at Thebes" (a musical version of +Oedipus) and "Die Zusammenfugung" (an opera about marijuana). Joining Klein in the last is Madeline Kahn (later the star of +On the Twentieth Century as well as many comic films), who gets to show off her operatic voice, though her real showcase is "Das Chicago Song," a Kurt Weill/Bertolt Brecht send-up in which she gets to do to Lotte Lenya what she would later do to Marlene Dietrich in Blazing Saddles. For most musical theater fans, the turns by Klein and Kahn will more than justify the purchase of this album. (Interestingly, missing from the disc is "The Girl of the Minute," a song from the show that marked the Broadway debut of the songwriters David Shire and Richard Maltby, Jr.) ~ William Ruhlmann, All Music Guide