"Call Me Mister"- Act One
The "Call Me Mister" sets were simple. According to Ethan Mordenn in Beautiful Mornin': The Broadway Musical in the 1940s, some of the best numbers were performed in front of "a traveler of colored blotches against a white field."
It opened with the men of the cast in uniform and the women dressed as canteen entertainers. The first number was performed in front of a closed curtain adorned with a caricature of the "ruptured duck," the lapel pin issued at discharge, at this point in time being widely worn by the returned vets. The cast sang of how the drama critics now had more power over them than General Eisenhower and explained the premise of the show. The curtain opened to show the men in a train singing the "Going Home Train," six contrasting melodies sung individually and then together. Bass baritone opera singer Lawrence Winters was the featured performer. The theme was the joy they felt being civilians again.
The first sketch was "Welcome Home" an object lesson on how not to welcome home a returning vet. In this case a family has read too many magazine articles about the psychological effect of the war on the men and how family members should treat them. For instance, believing, based on what she had read, that it was important for family members to act as if they had shared the battlefront experience, Betty Garrett, as the veteran's mother, greets him at the door wearing a helmet and a gun belt with two pistols. The whole family treats him as if he were a psycho. The skit split the critics.
The first act found most of the men still in uniform and included digs at life in the service. In one sketch, for instance, Harry Clark played Paul Revere trying to cut through Army red tape to requisition a horse so he can tell the populace that the British were coming. One of the funniest routines according to the critics was "Off We Go," depicting the wartime experiences of the members of the Army Air Force as imagined by infantrymen. Jules Munshin, Alan Manson and George Hall were featured in the bit which portrayed the aviators as characters in a Noel Coward play seemingly stationed at the Stork Club, drinking champagne toasts to the "Blue Lady of the Clouds," surrounded by adoring women. A youth moans "Look at me, 22 years old and still only a major."
A romantic subplot that ran through the revue featured a Navy man played by Danny Scholl and his wife, played by Paula Bane, separated by the war. He takes the lead on the ballad "(You've Always Been) Along With Me" and she sings "When We Meet Again."
In her first musical number, "Surplus Blues," Betty Garrett plays a waitress who had been the object of flirtatious attention from the men of the nearby army camp but with the camp deserted was lonely and forgotten. A soldier's reminiscences about his neighborhood corner drug store introduces a ballet sequence danced by David Nillo and Maria Karnilova.
Clark, Munson and Chandler Cowles sing "Military Man," fondly remembered by audiences as "the jerk song." The song tells the tale of the men who entered the service as bums, slobs and jerks and emerged after their years of military discipline and combat unchanged. "Still a jerk" became a catch phrase.
The bouncy title song. "Call Me Mister," belonged to song-and-dance man Bill Callahan. The first act finale production number found the cast in a department store exchanging their uniforms for civvies.