On Stage
SHIPLEY, JOSEPH T.
On STAGE Hits and Misses On the Main Stem By Joseph T Shipley Tonight in Samarkand1 is a dramatic illustration of the idea that one cannot escape one's fate. There is an old story of a man who,...
...The production of Christopher Fry's The Dark Is Light Enough4 proved most disappointing in its unimaginative direction...
...Presented by the Shakespearewrights...
...Gettner is completely self-absorbed...
...At the Downtown National Theater...
...By Christopher Fry...
...At the ANTA Theater...
...Theodore Bikel, as the police inspector who drifts in with handcuffs...
...where the commissar, wishing to check on his possible successor, sends for the latest "Who's Still Who...
...Presented by Feuer and Martin...
...This notion is brought to life in a traveling circus in the South of France...
...The Countess thinks always of others...
...Gretchen Wyler has fetching wiles as the movie star...
...Mainly, we watch the rodeo champion cowboy, with the cheap-night-club singer he has shanghaied to take to his Montana ranch and make her his bride...
...a smiling Gilbert is more at home amidst us than a scowling Swift...
...Hildegarde Neff grows enchanting before our eyes as the merely female Ninotchka becomes feminine...
...where some artists lend their fifth of a room for a jam session before the roomful escapes on a plane for the U.S.A...
...I have an appointment with him tonight in Samarkand...
...of the sternly official Ninotchka softening to silk and sex...
...This is mainly drawn through the contrast of the Countess Rosmarin Ostenburg and her one-time son-in-law, Richard Gettner...
...Miss Barrett brings both charm and intelligence to her role, with—when needed—resources of deeper emotion and integrity...
...The play itself goes back to the Bret Harte tradition of the man of common clay who is really the salt of the earth, the bum or roughneck who is really a diamond in the rough...
...There is little scope for hatred in America, and we as a people hate neither heartily nor long...
...His manager has planned an American tour...
...Don Ameche surprises us with his ease in the American's role, and the rest of the cast swing gaily along...
...the amorousness of the American star as her motion-picture version of Tolstoy's War and Peace turns into a tale of "that wench" Josephine...
...Presented by Bruce Becker and Robert E. Miller...
...At the Imperial Theater...
...The author of the prize-winning Picnic has turned out something more acceptable in Bus Stop,6 which excellent directing and acting turn into a vivid experience...
...We watch the common man—and his female counterpart—in a bus-stop restaurant in a small Kansas town, from 1 to 5 a.m...
...The playing is external, so the director has had to resort to external devices to bolster it...
...Sourab Kayam, in his crystal ball, gives the beautiful tiger-tamer two views of her future: one if she marries a juggler, the other if she goes off with a millionaire...
...Michael Gorrin, as the manager who drifts in with contracts...
...By William Inge...
...There are also scenes of the three Moscowteers enjoying gay Paree...
...Reversing the usual process, the musical acknowledges its source in the Greta Garbo film Ninotchka, though it travels far from that source...
...Presented by Russell-Farrow Productions...
...Directed by Marjorie Hildreth...
...Directed by Cy Feuer...
...the play is provocative but could itself have benefited from happier gazing into the crystal ball...
...Fry's play, rewarding but undramatic reading, requires more sensitive handling to give it fire onstage...
...Clarence Derwent should have been in this production...
...3 The Merchant of Venice...
...Perhaps Fry set his story in the Hungarian rebellion of 1848 because that struggle is so remote that its particular incidents—almost chocolate-soldiery in themselves—should not move us from our pondering of the universal thought...
...With fluid use of the large stage, the characters manage to stress the romantic and comic aspects of the play while keeping Shylock (as our age demands) a sympathetic figure...
...It is good to see William Inge turning from the banal brute caricatures of Picnic...
...Charles Aid-man makes almost a bravo, a young and fetching Douglas Fairbanks, out of Bassanio...
...Presented by Katharine Cornell and Roger L. Stevens...
...she enriches the evening...
...she is a living example of the respect each person should have for every other, to give him his chance to take up the challenge of life...
...Ben Edwards has given this tale a vivid tent setting, about which director Alan Schneider keeps the life of the circus swirling...
...Tyrone Power scarcely more than reads his lines: the beautiful Katharine Cornell stirs no faint flicker of emotion...
...and the requisite tuneful sentiment: "Paris Loves Lovers," "Satin and Silk," and "Silk Stockings...
...This pattern, you observe, gives wide scope for action...
...Cole Porter, with swirling music, carries us in various moods of song: Ninotchka's early theory about love: "It's a chemical reaction, that's all...
...then the Russians' hike toward "Siberia...
...There is an old story of a man who, seeing Death in the marketplace of Baghdad, takes horse and flees at once to Samarkand...
...Our vituperation may be strong, but our satire is seldom bitter...
...And Robert Cass, excellent as Sir Toby Belch in the recent Twelfth Night, by his very bulk forces an erring interpretation of the clown, a galloping Gobbo...
...The best satire comes, indeed, from those who can see the good points as well as the had in their victim...
...2 The Cross Is Always Greener...
...Jacques Deval is an intelligent playwright, who has given bright glintings of dialogue to facets of the thought...
...Silk Stockings is a most amusing satire, as well as a lively and light-flowing musical comedy...
...But Louis Jourdan is too gentle to convey the power the magician should have, and the beauty of Jan Ferrand as the tiger-tamer is not matched by grace and inner fire...
...Gentlemen's Agreement, and one aspect of Brigadoon, have accustomed us to such changes, but this earlier work is still entertaining as well as thought-evoking...
...Some of the gags are old stories "switched," but the turn is clever: "Didn't you know Prokofieff was dead...
...We watch the adolescent girl who is her assistant fall for the vagabond "professor" who quotes Shakespeare between drinks, dates the child for the weekend in the city, then (after we have learned that he is being watched as a corrupter of children) sweetly of his own accord tells her not to meet him...
...5 Silk Stockings...
...Suggested by Melchior Lengyel's Ninotchka...
...Both end on an exploding ship...
...Lesser figures are more appealing: Rosemary Prinz as the magician's naive, adoring niece...
...At the Jan Hus Auditorium...
...1 Tonight in Samarkand...
...The dancers are lovely, and are given good things to do...
...We would be more sanguine if he were to take direction in his coming products, Mol-iere's Miser and Shakespeare's Lear...
...By Sholom Alei-ehem...
...One would like to think that this is the kind of satire about themselves which the Russians could produce if they had, or were allowed to have, a sense of humor about their own government...
...There is also much of interest in the first play of Maurice Schwartz's season, Sholom Aleichem's It's Hard to Be a Jew, wrought into only occasionally amusing English as The Grass Is Always Greener.2 This is a picture of the adventures of a Russian Christian who, on graduation from his Gymnasium in 1905, takes the place of a Jewish classmate...
...only Arnold Moss infuses life into his role, its early reluctant ruthlessness, its later poignant withdrawal...
...So much is this true that, when the Countess shelters Gettner from his Austrian foes, he takes it as a sign that she loves him...
...Maurice Schwartz is very natural as the man in whose house the pseudo-Jew boards, and, while his wife overacts, Michael Tolan and Martin Brooks are pleasantly contrasted as the two transposed young men...
...Shylock himself is played intelligently but without emotional depth...
...4 The Dark Is Light Enough...
...Three agents are sent to induce the reluctant Russian to return...
...By Jacques Deval and Lorenzo Semple Jr...
...Dances by Eugene Loring...
...At the Music Box...
...Music and lyrics by Cole Porter...
...The rest of the cast, however, maintain the appropriate mood, especially Earle Hyman in his brief caricature as the Prince of Morocco, and Laurinda Barrett as Portia...
...Directed by Harold Clurman...
...6 Bus Stop...
...It is unfortunate that Mr...
...Anthony Ross as the professor, Lou Polan as the sheriff, and Albert Salmi as the cowboy who can't understand why everybody doesn't love him, play well together and build a series of sentimental sketches into a delightful production...
...Yet, all the stir of circus folk, all the eerie music that announces the two visions of the future, cannot compensate for this major lack...
...Elaine Stritch as the restaurant owner, Phyllis Love as the little girl, and Kim Stanley as the cabaret singer, all excellent, give their parts a patina of reality...
...She and the American fall in love...
...This thought arises from the merry romp that Silk Stockings5 has with the Soviet Union, poking a pert finger of fun into the flabby midriff, neatly laying bare the essential weaknesses of the Soviet system, but without any of the fanaticism that marks the usual picture of Russia today...
...After the man has left, Death remarks: "I was surprised to see him here...
...She marries the magician with the crystal ball—and their lives end on the exploding ship...
...of an American star come to Paris to make her first independent picture, with "glorious Technicolor, wide-spreading Cinemascope, and Stereophonic Sound...
...I didn't even know he was arrested...
...The team of George S. Kaufman, Leueen MacGrath and Abe Burrows has kept the dialogue speedy and crisp, and the situations both amusing and accurately aimed at the weaknesses of the Soviet regime...
...Directed by Guthrie McClintie...
...Harold Clurman has staged all this golden sentiment so naturally that even the falling snow outside (onstage, of course) cannot dim its glad glowing...
...Excellence of direction helps make the Jan Hus House production of The Merchant of Venice3 the most exciting that New York has seen in many seasons...
...We observe the bearded sheriff, the kindliest soul that ever knocked down a cowboy...
...With Fry's poetic expression, a poetically imaginative production might make a commanding drama...
...Instead, she believes in the dignity of all human beings...
...when they in turn dally in the delights of Paris, a genuine, tough Commie is dispatched to fetch them all...
...Presented by Robert Whitehead and Roger L. Stevens...
...There are scenes in Moscow—where responsibility for misfortune runs rapidly down the ranks...
...We see the good-hearted woman who runs the place, though for much of the time she is upstairs in bed with the bus-driver...
...and the tilted hat and cocked head of Robert Baines as Antonio, belying his melancholy, help the present Merchant to offer bargain fare indeed...
...By William Shakespeare...
...When she tells him of her checkered past, he confides that he is virgin enough for the two...
...This tough Commie happens to be a female, Ninotchka...
...Book by George S. Kaufman, Loueen MacCratb and Abe Burrows...
...the greeting of the French comrades to the Russians, "Hail, Bibinski...
...At the Morosco Theater...
...The basic idea holds: A great Russian composer, lingering in Paris, is summoned to return to Soviet Russia...
...Schwartz is both director and actor, for the one gets in the way of the other...
...It is manifestly and deservedly clear that there will be a long run on Silk Stockings...
...of a snowbound night...
Vol. 38 • March 1955 • No. 12
