On Stage
SHIPLEY, JOSEPH T.
ON STAGE Drama During the Christmas Season By Joseph T. Shipley Two new plays, in different ways, make light of—yet shed light on — solemn subjects. Both deserve to be listed among the season's...
...Ali Masoud of Pakistan is thoughtfully developed, a sort of fulcrum that balances the Soviet and Western worlds...
...Mary's guardians and the self-seeking musician her money is promoting...
...He wants to see man grow...
...Mary is a member of the Committee on Information and Freedom of the Press, along with representatives of Czechoslovakia, France, Pakistan, the Soviet Union, and the United Kingdom...
...2 Madam...
...But there is a mind at work behind the play...
...for the next corporation meeting, thousands of proxies come back in her name...
...Brightlee wakens her to spread joy with her money...
...The drama oFthe psychoanalyst's couch has foam-rubber-mattress presentation in Oh, Men...
...The current scoundrels are deposed...
...If this particular delegate, the play's argument runs, can be swerved by his emotions from Soviet ruthlessness, there is hope that the Iron Curtain may some day be melted into commuters' cars...
...Sidney Howard would probably have denied any such elaborate thought: indeed, he has said, "The play has no message: I'm no good whatever at messages...
...The skits, too, are varied...
...while calling the Devil evil...
...4 Oh, Men...
...On its bright surface, we watch the happy change the Devil brings to Mary Doyle...
...The commentator's calling out that woman's name at the psychological moment is what tumbles Petrovsky from his icy peak of Soviet hardness to the level of human emotions, and keeps him from revealing the Prescott scandal and destroying the peaceful prospects of the world...
...A high point of the evening is "Mark Twain," Harry Bela-fonte's singing enactment of a Mississippi River pilot's man swinging the plumb line...
...Unfortunately, Soviet official policy and the future of the world are thought to depend on the accidents of personal problems and the weaknesses of individual representatives...
...5 John Murray Anderson's Almanac...
...They may appear together, she as a fading duchess living in the past, he as a doddering butler of whom she makes present demands...
...The New Year is entitled to an Almanac, and John Murray Anderson's5 offers a wide assortment of jollity for all tastes...
...the authors, moreover, demonstrate it along a strangely linked chain of coincidences...
...The bright idea in his story—learning in "confessional" that a patient has had a fiery affair with the doctor's fianc?e—should have given body to the play...
...Among the Almanac's songs and dances, a merry romping couple, Carleton Carpenter and Elaine Dunn, do excellent work with "You're So Much a Part of Me" and "When Am I Going to Meet Your Mother...
...if Petrovsky, the Soviet delegate, carries out his threat to reveal it to the Assembly, Mary Prescott and her proposals go down the drain...
...Music and lyrics by Richard Adler, Jerry Rose and others...
...Thus Larry Blyden gives the audience hilarious moments at his first interview with the analyst, fidgety, embarrassed as he nears the couch, hesitant—then gradually more garrulous until he becomes almost impossible to stop...
...But Sidney Howard's "Dr...
...The story sweeps along amusingly...
...Oh, Women!* on the swift level of farce...
...but Mr...
...It is a wise and a delightful choice...
...1 Tho Solid Gold Cadillac, By Howard Teichmann and George S. Knaufman...
...A loud-speaker Narrator provides shrewd, witty comments between the scenes...
...The very name "Lucifer" means "bringer of light...
...This is less a play than a series of histrionic opportunities, neatly^ taken in turn by the members of the cast...
...To quiet her, the greedy officeholders give her a meaningless job with the firm...
...By Sidney Howard, Presented by T. Edward Hambleton and Norris Houghton...
...The authors manage all this in the best of good spirits...
...After a moment's try at seduction for himself, Dr...
...At the Broadhurst Theater...
...In one skit, Hermione Gingold as an aging actress loses her chance to play in Macbeth, because the director refuses to tell her "Which Witch...
...He is the Devil in that he hopes to make man equal God...
...Don't you lose your chance to see Hermione Gingold and her happy companions, as they romp through the Almanac, a budget of fun for '54...
...Always he prods man to turn what is good into something better...
...The characters are shrewdly differentiated and displayed...
...In these roles, Minoo Daver and Ben Astar are but two of the highly competent performers, with Katharine Cornell as usual compelling attention by sheer force...
...Its picture of human vanity and inanity suggests that somehow the individual is still the pivot of man's movement...
...In good taste, swift pace, satiric sketch, madcap song or torch, and comic collaboration, it is an overture of delight to 1954...
...Chodorov chose to let his characters dance with tail-feathers and tomahawk around the doctor's fires, instead of broiling the modern witch-doctor over his own flames...
...It is, on the surface, just a funny play about a small stockholder in a tremendous corporation who asks naive but embarrassing questions...
...The legends are created by the preservers of things as they are...
...includes, amid its earth-annihilating exigencies, the life-annihilating prospect uf atomic war...
...Directed by Howard Lindsay...
...The Solid Gold Cadillac1 shows how one honest individual can upset a crooked system...
...Thus eased in our concern, we can look with a more objective eye on such a drama as The Prescott Proposals.3 Mary Prescott, in the play, is a U.S...
...They are, in order of opening, The Solid Gold Cadillac and Madam, mil You Walk...
...Brightlee leaves Mary in the arms of a taxi-driver turned hoofer, a simple but sincere young man...
...Sketches directed by Cyril Richard, Dances and musical numbers staged by Donald Saddler, Scenery by Raoul Peno du Bain, Costumes by Thomas Becher...
...Both deserve to be listed among the season's best...
...Heuer reassures us that, theoretically at least he cannot guarantee the fact), hydrogen-bomb reactions cannot convert the earth into a blazing star...
...The dialogue is fresh and intelligent...
...Before him, Milton's noble rebel was an evil force and Andreyev's questioner brought only tragedy in his wake...
...The Czechoslovak delegate had been Mary Prescott's lover in Prague, a dozen years ago...
...they include a hilarious burlesque of dramatic recitals by Jean Kerr, Don Brown's Body, in which the mild-mannered zany Orson Bean enacts a super-sadist known to Mickey Spillaniacs as Mike Hammer...
...Hermione Gingold, new to America, and Billy de Wolfe, new to Broadway, have contrasting styles that balance the skits...
...Let us, then, look at the play...
...they can merely destroy all earthly life...
...More at ease on the couch is the woman patient, whose revelations Anne Jackson- -gilds with bright humor, as she details the reasons why she has to leave her husband...
...At the Imperial Theater...
...And while we are enjoying a turn of phrase or of wit, some trick of sheer theater hits us below the belt and doubles us up in belly laughter...
...Presented by Cheryl Crawford in association with Anderson Lawler...
...He now comes secretly to her apartment and drops dead in her bedroom...
...delegate to the UN...
...and behold...
...As that innocent and loving husband, Gig Young gets rebelliously tipsy, then gives a swift summary-in-action of Ibsen's A Doll's House—which, he claims, produced the attitude behind the evils of domestic strife today...
...Will You Walk...
...At the Phoenix Theater 3 The Prescott Proposals, By Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse...
...And Betsy von Furstenberg as the couch-doctor's fianc?e has several tempestuous scenes—all of which by contrast leave a rather colorless tone for Franchot Tone as the psychoanalyst behind it all...
...Brightlee" wants to wake the world to love and laughter...
...The play reminds us that Prometheus taught man to use fire—for which, legend rewarded him with a vulture eternally gnawing his vitals...
...Presented by Leland Hayward...
...Written and directed by Edward Ghodorov...
...The boat carrying the lovers over the Central Park lake to the statue that comes to life, the taxi-driver breaking into his dance in the Magistrate's Court, the Devil treating the skeptics to a flash of hellfire—there is enough slapstick to sound off Gargantua's buttocks...
...The American commentator alone knows of the earlier affair...
...as the one sin, to "leave well enough alone...
...they cannot wholly hide his role...
...The Soviet delegate suspects that the Czech came to Mary to ask pay for deserting the Soviet cause...
...She has suggested that the various nations start with their points of agreement, and build upon these toward international harmony...
...She has been hiding in shame because her Tammany-politician father died in Sing Sing: she wants to make good use of the ill-gotten wealth he has left her...
...Madam, Will You Walk,2 Sidney Howard's last play, has first come to New York...
...or separately, she bow-legged over a cello, he wondering (until it is too late to wonder) about the lethal intentions of his uncle's widow...
...He is naturally opposed by the conventional folk around...
...Josephine Hull makes the little stockholder a thoroughly amusing figure, although occasionally—as when she pulls an old corset out of her desk drawer — incidents are tugged in merely for laughter...
...The End of the World: A Scientific Inquiry, by Kenneth Heuer...
...He also is the only one who knows Petrovsky had sent his own sweetheart to her death (for "deviationism...
...At the last moment, the Soviet representative turns "human"—to use the play's term...
...Having nothing to do, she writes friendly letters to the stockholders...
...This is, in fact, the traditional role of all great devils...
...He lists, as the one great virtue, curiosity...
...Staged by Mr...
...The play avoids the Judaeo-Chiistian story—but re-read why Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden...
...They are as the two ends of the balance-pole with which man walks his tightrope up the centuries...
...The tycoons are no more than caricatures, but the mood is no more than farce...
...Curiosity and contentment, convention and revolt, what are commonly called good and evil are different indeed, but they are inseparable...
...Oh, Women...
...Out of the play comes a new evaluation...
...In this play, the Devil makes his farthest claims, and spreads his subtlest lures...
...The Devil's arguments and devices baffle the conventional folk: The Judge is circumvented, the priest is confused, the old woman is subdued, the suitor is diverted...
...The thesis itself is questionable...
...Presented by Michael Gruce, Stanley Gilkey and Harry Rigby...
...The secret and the future of the world are safe...
...But the drama of the UN remains to be shown...
...Despite the far-fetching, and the weak fusion of the emotions and the idea, The Prescott Proposals holds...
...Petrovsky, although the expected type of bullying bellower, is nonetheless vivid...
...A scandal has smogged the Committee...
...Two of the play's four scenes show the Committee room at the UN, with the members embattled for their goals...
...Kaufman, Presented by Max Gordon...
...The action is tense...
...At the Belasco Theater...
...and Marci Crompton whirls dizzily in ballet movement through a dance of Oscar Wilde's "The Nightingale and the Rose...
...At Henry Miller's Theater...
Vol. 37 • January 1954 • No. 1
