On Stage
SHIPLEY, JOSEPH T.
On STAGE Three Comedies Brighten Stage By Joseph T. Shipley GIVE A THIRD of the credit to Broadway for the three happiest hits of the early season. Two are burlesques; the third is burlesqued....
...Clyde Fitch's The Stubbornness of Geraldine, for example, in 1902, was travestied in The Stickiness of Gelatine, which starred Fay Templeton, William Collier, and Weber and Fields...
...First, the audience didn't know what to make of the plot, which was lampooning the sex comedy that audiences had been taking seriously for forty years...
...2The Clandestine Marriage...
...You can enjoy Congreve's The Way of the World, Garrick's (and Colman's) The Clandestine Marriage, both in Greenwich Village, and The Boy Friend along the Gay White Way...
...Book, music and lyrics by Sandy Wilson...
...At the Royale Theater...
...At the Cherry Lane Theater...
...the cavorting of the Carnival, the half Apache fling, half Spanish slink of the tango??this and much more combine to make The Boy Friend a rampage of frolicking hard to match in any season...
...in 1954, it is kidded, with frequent turns to the audience and exaggerated twists of action...
...By David Garrick...
...Congreve's foreboding was caught in two lines of his Prologue: "Of those few fools who with ill stars are curst, Sure scribbling fools, called poets, fare the worst...
...1The Way of the World...
...Save for the tag-lines, he wrote The Way of the World in prose, but that didn't save him...
...Presented by Feuer and Martin...
...Garrick's play, presented first in 1766, has several satiric portraits, notably that of Lord Ogleby, created by Garrick himself and now very amusingly played by Frederic Warriner...
...Presented by the Players Theater...
...The Way of the World,1 one of the greatest English comedies, was a failure when it was first produced in 1700...
...Shift to the flappers and jitterbug mood of the 1920s for Broadway's first contribution to the season's hilarity...
...The Boy Friend may mark a happy return to a merry custom of seasons ago, when almost any hit was followed (within a month or two, while it was still on the boards) by a full evening's burlesque of it ?? which sometimes outran the original...
...I could be happy with you, dear, if you could be happy with me" is but one of a half-dozen that are such neat parodies they might be taken for the real thing...
...In 1766, the story was presented seriously...
...Both of these "faults" became virtues to later times, and the play grew popular...
...Unlike Elmer Rice, Arthur Miller and other recent recalcitrants, he kept that vow for his remaining thirty years...
...but pretty Poll and her boy friend will settle for a room in bloom??that is, a room in Blooms-bury, and love...
...Designed by Charles Rosen...
...In sharp contrast to the neat satire of Lady Wishfort, across the Village there is the broad burlesque of Sada Thompson as the widow trying to seem young in The Clandestine Marriage.2 (Every comedy had such an old lady, until Gilbert and Sullivan mocked the type off the stage...
...well-spoken English, there is much in the satire that strikes at targets today...
...The present company plays The Way of the World in the style of the later eighteenth century...
...And Julie Andrews, as Polly, is a neat parody capture of the mooning flapper in her golden dream of love...
...3The Boy Friend...
...By William Congreve...
...Despite the period costumes, stately ways and (blessings be...
...The book of The Boy Friend3 is at best innocuous, but the lyrics are superb parodies of the love-songs of twenty years ago...
...Directed by Vida Hope...
...Choreography by John Heawood...
...its author vowed never to write for the stage again...
...In this production, the men seem the defter performers...
...its satire, its parody and its brilliance are delightfully revealed...
...At the Provincetown Playhouse...
...Directed by Warren Enters...
...It is, however, cleverly designed and staged, so that the play, not seen for a century, provides an evening of gay theater...
...Dee Victor makes Lady Wishfort an especially effective simpering widow trying to seem young??in a play that achieves perennial youthfulness...
...All invite your laughter about times gone by...
...The period "when impudence and malice pass for wit" is no farther away than The Man Who Came to Dinner and the would-be cognoscenti of the columns...
...Sets and costumes by Don Crawford...
...But it is in its action that The Boy Friend is most successful, and most hilarious...
...It is all to the good that, on Broadway and off, deftness, merry humor and keen wit have come to brighten the stage as the season starts...
...In the Garrick play, the practical girl tosses aside love in a cottage for "indifference, and a coach and six...
...Amanda Steel, for instance, plays too nearly natural in her rendering of the secretly wed Fanny, still ardently wooed...
...Warren Enters knows how to give the production an amusing pseudo-courtly flow, and most of the acting, especially of the women, is excellent...
...Presented by Proscenium Productions...
...Directed by William Congreve...
...Directed by Jack Landau...
...Secondly, the wit sparkled so rapidly and frequently that the mind could not follow...
...The girls' way of abruptly jerking out of demure poses, the readiness with which everyone breaks into a dance (which musical of the '20s did not try to create a new dance1...
...Two things damned his play at its opening...
Vol. 37 • October 1954 • No. 43
