The See-Saw of Sex on the Stage
SHIPLEY, JOSEPH T.
The See-Saw of Sex on the Stage By Joseph T. Shipley "Cheesecake"and "Girlie Shows ENTERTAINMENT, booming today aa navar before, is more frankly and fully than ever a world of escape. Which is...
...It is ¦ relaxation of leisure, out of boredom, or escspe from deeper emotions, I refer, of course, not to tore, but to "sex...
...How far may we expect the theatre to venture...
...Helen Hayes in Virforto Regina...
...1944: Eleven musicals...
...Jordan, A Guy Named Joe...
...And by all counts our theatre is in the midst of what the columnists might call a aexceedingly sexy if not sexces-sively s e x e d big boom...
...Even John Van Druten atones for The Voice of the Turtle with the voice of the people, in / Remember Mama, a sentimental, moral, and completely sexlees idealization of motherhood combined with an American success atory...
...although shortly after our theatres were closed to the striptease, it first appeared uncensored in war-torn London...
...One of these, to be sure, displsyed Ethel Merman in Red, Hot and Blue...
...but most of them typified by the recurrent Ethel Merman in the same sort of thing, now called "Something for the Hoys...
...Sex is far from their prime concerns...
...ality in addition to more obvious qualifications, which ia far more than can be said for meat that tried to follow her...
...Five years ago, on the brink of Munich, there waa a surge of the spirit, • revival of religion, on th* stage...
...But th* Gypsy Rose baa an attractive person...
...Leap to New Year's...
...and the social problems of our time are suggested in the book, play, and movie Thunder Roek...
...A soldier might be frightened while awaiting the signal, or find himself quaking when the tense moments cease...
...Later, having written a detective atory, Miea La* wrote * play about an *i-*trip-Uaa* performer thai baa written a book...
...but while-he is in the surge of action he has no time for fear...
...but the timea have let loose the girls...
...It it for the theatregoer, not the man at the front, that posters and newspaper pictures display their wares...
...Out of banned burleaque came the troupers at weU...
...To escape th* guardians of our morala, tht playt drew in the theme of the war...
...We have already—in Elmer Rice's A New Life of two seasons back — beheld the throes of rhildbird on the stage It is a long journey, however, from the birth to the death of sex...
...We may compare the quiver of sex to the shiver of fear...
...Katharine Cornell in The Win gleet Victory by Maxwell Anderson...
...By New Year's of 1943, Oypay Boa* Lee waa exhibited in Star and Garter—Babby Clark ana the star...
...The indignation and the slogans that carried us in have been succeeded by the strain of long hours at war jobs, of hard routine in camps...
...it plays a large part in Bloomer Girl...
...Moat of the rest—with lilies such as "Janie," "Kiss and Tell," "The Doughgirls," "Victory Belles"—sought to win the thestregoer with the fillip of sex...
...Advertising a film version of an old bed-room farce, Up in Mabel'i Room, a scantily clad female for a few weeks towered, twenty feet tall, on the side of the theatre at 47th Street and Broadway...
...he finds a now girl, and lives with her the entire week-end...
...John Gielgud in Hamlet...
...But while our "sexperts" at home are tickling history below the belt, our fighters abroad are earnestly creating new history...
...Although such signs are still in the minority, they are weather-vanes in a wind that will again blow the atage clean...
...And what the girlies wear makes the pictures a home-front version of the "pin-up girl...
...and it seems scheduled for further stress in musicals to come...
...And when he had finished recounting his plans for overpowering th* Turks, Catherine commanded: "Come up to my room tonight, and well talk Turkey...
...The unprecedented popularity of the ballet is one evidence of this...
...Sex has never been maa's prime concern...
...Similarly, the preoccupation with the lighter and looser aspects of love ia an escape valve, or an after let-down, from the intense emotions and drives of the sterner hours of life...
...Which is another way of saying it is • whirl of sex...
...but this was counterbalanced by the success of the wholesome romantic spectacle White Horte Inn...
...Among the twenty-seven dramaa the holiday crowds might view were a half dozen of unquestioned quality...
...Just so the semi-sdolescent girls, with a vague arousal of feelings in thia straining time, with a desire to give forth emotions but no appropriate object, shriek end swoon for Frank Sinatra...
...among them the refreshing "Oklahoma...
...today ah* twaggera undisturbed in her Catherine Wat Gremt, which snares the home-front view in a symbol...
...It waa Prince Potemkin, com* with word of the Turkish invasion from the south...
...And the swiftest anodyne is sex...
...The "girlie shows" are officially closed...
...In two years, if the need continues, they will make good nurses' aides...
...Our major playwrights, after a sounding battery of war plays, have been quiet In their absence, the little lickerish ones hav* been loud...
...while its farcical powers were developed in such film tales as the Topper series (from the books) and The Canterville Ghott...
...He is a sergeant in Van Druten's Voice of tht Turtle, the story of a soldier on leave who cornea to meet ona girl with whom he's been having in affair...
...but by all accounts the service aaaa's favorite pictures are still from the family album...
...But the sex play grows at once more timely and apparently mora respectable when s soldier is under covers...
...The home folks, turning from work or from the news accounts, echo Let us forget...
...The bed-room fare* hat coma back in ita pure—if I may use the word—and unadulterated form, as in School for Bridet," in which, ita advertisements boast, "anything goes...
...That New Year's Eve on Broadway, indeed, showed a fair picture...
...The "c'm up V tee me tometimt" motif hat bten lifted from the gutter to the throne...
...Perhaps it was this play's success thst encouraged the presentation of Good Morning, Corporal, in which the first act curtain rises on the boy and girl in bed...
...and again "Othello," with Paul Robeson...
...Soon, however, if the signs point true, we may hope for a turning from the surface of aex, and a resurgence of plays that will again seek to probe the depths of the spirit of man...
...The movies were quick to seize upon this fantasy, which the devices of the film can cleverly exploit, for earnest or humorous ends...
...their almost instant intimacy is accepted as natural and quite a la mode...
...One morning, however, passersby found her covered from neck to ankles in a fluttering nightgown of white cloth...
...Seven years ago, when the strip-tease was banned and th* New York burlesque houses closed—with San Francisco and other cities similarly tightening the bars—it looked as though the theatre folk had taken the lesson, and Would heed their ways...
...Another play, Trio, because of ita theme waa refused a Broadway theatre, could not open in New York...
...Ruth Gordon in The Country Wife...
...Dance in its more wholesome, less sensusl aspects has swept across from the ballet stage into Oklahoma, into even One Touch of Venus...
...And in the first week of the lush and lavish Seven Lively Arte, the protest of a religioua organization caused the removal of th* glass woman who lights up in the wrong spots...
...It was, all things considered, a typical "good year" in the theatre...
...Perhaps, indeed, the pin-up girl is in great measure for home consumption...
...Sex has always been a seasoning in the theatre...
...Mae West, when aba wrote and enacted a play called Sex, was stopped by the police...
...Publicity men approach editors with tuch suggestions aa this actual message: "WAR NEWS: Send your photog...
...A dozen recent movies, in words—"Lana Turner's most luscious role"—and in posters, flaunt similar appeals...
...But the front of the Winter Garden unmolested displayed the longest limbs on record, as a "Varga girl" —barred with Etquire from the privilege of second-class mail—reclined to advertise A Mexican Hay ride...
...The suave writing of this drama glosses the amoral picture of the amorous couple...
...and play after play, from the revived Outward Bound to the Pulitzer Prize winner Our Town, showed scenes in a life after death...
...now we are passing through its season...
...Especial pose* of attractive females, presumably to be sent to oar force* throughout the world, are to many a drug-store window througgout our land...
...There were also You Con't Take It With You, Idiot'i Delight, Brother Rat, Dead End, and another dozen plays that, although of less worth, did not center their stories on sex...
...and other pictures expanded the tender or sentimental aspects of the theme...
...The great Greek drama, the tragedies of Shskespeare, are roused by other urges—because the life of the times was full, was rich...
...TlUS misplaced emphasis on sex was not the earliest effect of the war on our entertainment...
...Cheesecake, prominently displayed in Broad- , way restaurant windows, is alto Broadway slang for prominently displayed no*her Hmbs...
...The "leg-show" came off the stage onto the billboards, into the newspaper advertisements even of the staid New York Times...
...Let us forget, say the men back from service, the men in from training...
...Similarly the Palace Theatre found that it had been too venturesome: after the first few days, there disappeared the enormous papier mache silk-clad leg that waved slowly up and down above the sidewalk...
...But now th* war has been with us for a while...
...Doubtless many of the movie stars, in glamorous poses, adorn tents in the South Pacific But there were more "slinky pictures of Marlene Dietrich, in a supposedly alluring moment of Kit met, on the sides of Zoom Broadway Box Office express company trucks la the** United State...
...the gayer, the less harmful, release is on the stage...
...The recent popularity of the ice shows, not only on country-wide tour but in supposedly sophisticate New York, is additional sign of a fresh desire for entertainment without benefit of the sex...
...And by the news of battle, and of deaths in the war...
...Aristophanes jests about the lighter aspects of love...
...Life magazine has brought out a special number, called "Letter to G.L's," to acquaint aw soldiers abroad with what's going on back borne: Urn recliniag Mariana, aa lengthily exposed above the Aster Theatre, it in th* forefront of the issue...
...Dance halls and delinquents have their shoddy tales...
...the cancan gives way before the barn dance, and Frou-Frou ia supplanted by Agnes de Mill...
...Yet there are already tignt that the mood it changing...
...but aex does not come widely into the drsma until the English Restorstion comedy, under the frivolous Stuart Kings, whose court played heedlessly until the Bloodless Revolution threw them from their throne...
...Here Comet Mr...
...And as the season drew toward warm weather the proportion of these plays increased, with crowding escapades of service men on leave and pseudo-case-histories of juvenile delinquents "giving a good time" to the boys that are giving their all for their country...
...In this country we moved toward our part in World War II with a succession of serious dramas, some picturing the threat of Nazism, some glorifying America—and with an escape not into sex but into fantasy...
...The world-wide tragedy brought death and the next world into our thoughts...
...to me for some swell CHEESECAKE on this Babe...
...Americana in dance and drama is becoming the vogue...
...Meanwhile, insidiously sex was rearing its head on the dimmed-out but still Gay White Way...
...Burlesque hat been killed, but it baa lively ghosts...
...This it t civilian concept of a campaign...
...and toe police atepped in to cheek these sly returns...
...Catherine, empress of all the Russia a, looked at the handsome stranger...
...Anderson's High Tor...
...IT is easy to blame the change on the fighting men, and shrug one's shoulders...
...There were only four musical comedies playing...
...But an unease* suspicion creeps over some of us that priorities fin sex are garnered rather by the civilian than br>the»Boldier...
...Walter Huston in Othello...
...Of the twenty-four dramas, but afse were outstanding: Helen Hayes again, in "Harriet...
...Two versions of Outward Bound appeared...
Vol. 27 • December 1944 • No. 52
