On Stage
SHIPLEY, JOSEPH T.
On STAGE By Joseph T Shipley Theater Fare For Every Taste The Comedie Francaise. Plays in French by Moliere, Beaumarchais, Marivaux, Musset. Presented by S. Hurok. At the Broadway...
...Apart from any obligation, such performers as Louis Seigner, Beatrice Bretty, Micheline Boudet, Jacques Charon, working with finish and finesse, give us gay opportunity to behold satire with style, and bantering with beauty...
...By Ira Levin from the book by Mac Hyman...
...Put The Chalk Garden on your list...
...By Enid Bagnold...
...There is vigor of a ruder sort in the Jan Hus Macbeth...
...Presented by the Shakespearewrights...
...Laurel goes with her mother...
...but she laughs more than the audience in her Xmas Eve tipsy scene, and even her boyfriend leaves her before the play is over...
...If you re seeking only laughs, go out for dinner, have a drink or two...
...A few very minor matters obtrude...
...We hope that the inevitable automation will come without too great disturbance of the economic scene, such as plays like The Machine Stormers picture in the earlier Industrial Revolution...
...A lot of this is silly, especially in the second act...
...Sets by Peter Larkin...
...At the Broadway Theater...
...While the Comedie Francaise continues to delight all comers, I wish more Americans would take advantage of this opportunity to see great acting, and to make some measure of repayment of our debt to "the House of Moliere...
...The testing psychiatrist grows testy...
...where the comic-book material offers desperate remedies for the predicaments into which Private Will dumps two generals...
...Presented by Robert Fryer and Lawrence Carr...
...Less quickening to the mind, recommended only after cocktails, is The Desk Set, in which the germ of an idea is drowned in alcohol with Shirley Booth...
...Macbeth...
...The governess is grimly played by Siobhan McKenna (we'd like to see her in Shaw's St...
...Thus, when vaulting ambition "o'er-leaps itself and falls on the other," for what sophomores is the word "side" added...
...The Chalk Garden...
...Incidentally, we still owe Beaumarchais, one of the playwrights represented, for money he gave us during the American Revolution...
...Much farther down the intellectual scale come the belly-laughs of No Time for Sergeants, a farce of a back-country Georgian drafted into the air force...
...The Desk Set dismisses the new threat with a tipsy leer and forced laughter...
...At the Broadhurst Theater...
...As Bunny, head of the reference department of a large broadcasting company, Shirley does her best to carry the misled tale...
...By William Shakespeare...
...By William Marchant...
...The governess, who has a green thumb, even in the chalky soil of the Sussex garden, stays with grandma: and perhaps mother has learned that children, like chalk, need proper handling if they are to make good figures in the world...
...Joan, her London hit), with Gladys Cooper delightful as grandma and Betsy von Furstenberg in her best role as the spoiled, neglected girl...
...At the Barry-more Theater...
...The witches are well visualized, in group and pouncing stir, and there is a different and effective Porter...
...when he asks about Will's interest in sex...
...We owe to it an awareness of the possibilities of the stage, and the preservation of acting—not (Moscow) as an extension of living, nor (Hollywood) as the exploitation of a personality, but as a consciously studied art...
...At the Jan Hus Auditorium...
...But it is set in swift-changing scenes: Myron McCormick is curtly brisk as the crack but cracking sergeant, and Andy Griffith oddly genial as the simple guy from Georgia...
...At the Alvin Theater...
...The Desk Set...
...Facing reality...
...Will invites him to drop in on the barracks discussions...
...Crux of the situation is Laurel's governess: In her flights from reality, Laurel has played with notions of rape and murder...
...The airplane on which Will is gunner gets tangled in an atomic test: Will emerges as a "dead hero," and goes home to explain how be got his medal...
...The neglected girl, Laurel, in this case has been living with her grandmother, an irrelevant whirligig who also has a garden...
...The red-haired Mel Dowd gives Lady Macbeth both lust and luster, as well as the leap of overvaulting ambition...
...Presented by Irene Selznick...
...No Time for Sergeants...
...then see No Time for Sergeants...
...Will's sergeant cannot handle or get rid of him...
...the governess has been to prison for the latter crime...
...Presented by Maurice Evans...
...The deep stage stirs with swift action as the tragedy moves to its tumultuous close...
...Intelligence is also at work in The Chalk Garden, redeeming a soap-opera story (very much like the plot of A Roomful of Roses) with offbeat characters that seem ready to fly in through any window...
...And when we learn that the company is going to keep both the new mechanical brain and all the research workers this ought to replace, intelligence and dramatic conflict have also departed...
...This is a surging and a sound Macbeth...
...But these are minnows in a whale of a production...
...And why, when the messenger—"the raven itself"—brings word of the King's coming, why give a literal offstage "Caw...
...Pernell Roberts, as Macbeth, begins with a quiet dignity from which he rises to impressive tragic power...
...behold...
Vol. 38 • November 1955 • No. 46
