On Stage

...True, it was popular on Broadway, enjoying a run of 400 performances, and it was a bigger hit when George Cukor made it into a film the following year...

...Despite his plebian status he behaves like a gentleman...

...Along the way Mike serves as a catalyst for Tracy's shedding of her inhibitions...

...As he is standing in plain view of the guests, the telegram he sent earlier is read aloud by the butler...

...There is a very amusing farcical interlude when the sisters decide to portray the beautiful people as they believe outsiders see them...

...Meg Mundy, who was once Sartre's Respectful Prostitute, plays Tracy's none too authoritarian queen mother with just the right shade of comic dignity— but the script gives her little to develop...

...One is a scene of Emma Goldman talking to some women and workers...

...The connection between each of the pieces is slender, and only the haziest outline of a dramatic theme is apparent...

...The playwright has surrounded Tracy with a collection of stock figures or with people like Mike, who is so inconsistent that he has no feet to stand on...

...In fact, the production is a bit too cute and glossy...

...Carolyn Mignini, LynneThig-pen, Mary Catherine Wright, Trey Wilson and Jerry Zaks are equally fine...

...The theater has not yet completely recovered from a recent long period of hypernaturalism, and a return to the elegant, stylish, diverting plays of the' 30s may have seemed like a worthwhile idea...

...The title refers to photographs engraved on enameled tin surfaces that often serve as the backs of small mirrors—an apt image for the America of yore that is the evening's subject...

...She passes out and he carries her up the stairs to her bedroom...

...A better balance is struck by a group of traditional songs pertaining to "The Factory," including the beautiful "Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child" and a few other spirituals...

...What makes Tintypes pleasurable is, most of all, the verve the five members of the ensemble bring to the performance...

...She can bring both fantasy and depth to any part, and this one, conceived by Barry with her lively, seemingly capricious yet inherently quite straightforward personality in mind, was especially suited to her spirit...

...The play does have virtues...

...What the play needs more than anything else, though, is a director who can help the characters achieve the dimension they lack...

...In an ill-timed and out of place scene, Alexander Lord, Tracy's estranged father, then unexpectedly arrives and tells his daughter that they have never been close because she always seemed to him "a bronze goddess...

...Tintypes should be around for a while because it is entertaining—one of the common (though not always frankly conceded) purposes of theater-going...

...It is an odd choice for introducing the Lincoln Center Theater Company, which has reopened the Beaumont after three years of darkness...

...Now, after a few glasses of the bubbly—no doubt French —she invites Mike to join her for a nocturnal swim in the nude...

...The play opens on the eve of Tracy's marriage to her new fiance, George Kit-tredge, a coal baron closer in style to Pittsburgh than to Philadelphia...

...One can merely suppose that Tracy's choice of Kittredge is a reaction to her first husband, Dexter Haven—who is invited to the wedding without her knowledge by younger sister Dinah...

...The only thing clear about Dext, as everybody calls him, is that he has never had any contact with a coal mine...

...To strengthen the fiction, he even sends off a telegram signed "Uncle Willie" apologizing for not attending the wedding because of a bad cold...

...To him, Tracy is not so much a woman as a superior being who will usher him into the Lords' world...

...A good new work in that vein would have been better, however...

...Tintypes, at the John Golden Theater, is nostalgia without a play, and in its own way it succeeds...

...Macaulay "Mike" Connor is a reporter who has written a book (when Tracy asks why he is still working as a journalist, he replies that his serious writing has brought him the grand sum of $600 for two years' work...

...They sing, mime and dance their eclectic repertoire with a wonderful sense of timing, and they seem to enjoy what t hey are doing so much that we are quite ready to enjoy it as well...

...Cynthia Nixon, in her stage debut as Dinah Lord, Tracy's candid and far from retarded sister, has the only role that comes close to being effectively drawn besides Blythe Danner's...

...Curiously, none of the songs are taken from that American treasury, Songs of Protest, even though the period covered was the era of Joe Hill, Aunt Molly and the Wobblies no less than Anna Held, Jewish vaudeville and the Panama Canal...

...He appears embarrassed at having worked for his fortune, instead of inheriting it along with a smooth bearing...

...In the current production, Blythe Danner handles the role beautifully...

...Mike Connors sums up their ambiguous appeal: "The prettiest sight in this fine pretty world is the privileged class enjoying its privileges...

...The Philadelphia Story has other funny moments...

...This is not an outstandingly original comic episode, but it gets a big laugh...

...The Philadelphia Story cannot be passed off as the herald of a new Lincoln Center Story...

...they do not provide the intended contrast to the shiny, dreamy world of the good old years...

...Thus does champagne keep the play within the bounds of 1939 stage morality...

...Nevertheless, the next day she breaks her engagement to George, convinced she can be more than a "virgin goddess" for Dext...

...As John Steinbeck once observed, " It has always been lightly thought that singing people are happy people...

...Tracy's brother Seth has a plump part for no detectable reason...

...But one cannot help wondering why Philip Barry's play is now being given its first major revival since its prewar heyday at the Vivian Beaumont Theater...

...Accompanying him is a photographer named Liz Imbrie who has done some painting...

...Since Alexander Lord lives away from his family, he persuades Uncle Willie to play daddy at the marriage ceremony for the sake of appearances...

...The greatest and most enduring songs are wrung from unhappy people...

...he is an upper-class Philadelphian whom the family likes more than his coarse replacement...

...The Depression and other financial unpleasantnesses rarely intrude upon Barry's Philadelphia...

...Her only problem is her ex-husband...

...Barry probably thought this would help motivate Tracy's rediscovery of her first husband, or give the father a more human presence...

...The creators seem to have been aware of this, for they have injected a few notes of less polished reality...

...Conceived by Marty Kyte, Mel Marvin and director Gary Pearle, this "new musical" is a handsome, technically expert assemblage of some 45 songs and three or four sketches from the turn of the century...

...Drinking champagne, we are told, once brought Tracy to the roof of the mansion where she stood naked, "arms out to the moon...

...Although whatever Barry intended as a psychological basis for Tracy emerges as superficially Freudian, Danner, too, possesses the whimsicality needed to cover up the script's shallowness...

...Q imone Signoret claims that nostalgia is not what it used to be, but the evocation of things past remains a popular device on Broadway, not merely at the Beaumont...

...Tracy is perfectly at ease in the luxurious family mansion with a butler, a butler's aide and two diligent chambermaids, not to mention kitchen servants we never see and a handyman-gardener who appears during the last few minutes of the evening...

...Upon Alexander's surprising arrival, he is introduced to outsiders as Uncle Willie...

...But these brief moments are too isolated and superficial to come across as anything more than awkward interruptions...

...There also is one fully developed part, that of a rich Philadelphia heiress, Tracy Lord, written originally for Katherine Hepburn...

...She is more or less secretly in love with Mike, and at the end winds up in his arms—a hackneyed angle that does not enhance The Philadelphia Story...

...They are actually much more interesting to 1980 spectators while parodying themselves as grotesque snobs than when behaving normally, like the real snobs they are...

...And while a character who appears at the end to push some chairs around and say a few words may be welcomed by Actors' Equity, this is one more structural flaw in a play often cited as an example of meticulous stagecraft...

...Its dated manners and mannerisms are often strangely beguiling...

...Mike and Liz have come to the Lord's mansion to finish a story on Philadelphia upper-class life...

...Our curiosity about what went wrong in his relationship with Tracy is not satisfied until a heated later exchange between the two where he calls her a "virgin goddess...

...Perhaps the new repertory's "artistic directorate" —comprised of Edward Albee, Woody Allen, the avant-garde director Liviu Ciulei, Sarah Caldwell, Robin Phillips, and Ellis Rabb—had a nostalgic desire to rehabilitate the "comedy of manners...

...Ellis Rabb has staged The Philadelphia Story with the obvious intention of presenting a droll and pretty sight of "the privileged class enjoying its privileges," and the sunny, gilded and colorful set by John Conklin is quite pleasing to the eye...

...The two outsiders who make things happen come far enough from the wrong side of the tracks to provide a few good satirical moments, but not far enough to put them in sharp conflict with the beautiful people whose company we are supposed to find exhilarating...

...Coming after Dext's "virgin goddess" description, the sentimental intrusion doesn't really do either...