On Stage
SHIPLEY, JOSEPH T.
On STAGE Four Plays That Press Too Hard By Joseph T Shipley Except for a folksy play of Israeli life, the recent offerings along Broadway have been trying too hard. Too much pressure in the play...
...By Joseph Buloff and Felix Leon...
...Anouilh is usually fanciful and poetic : this version is heavy-handed and flat...
...Music by James Mundy...
...David Atkinson has a good voice...
...At the Booth Theater...
...Presented by the Heritage Group Players...
...She toys with her late husband's illegitimate son-both roles played by Jean Pierre Aumont...
...Presented by the Theater Guild...
...The characters, however, are almost drowned in the rush of incidents...
...Bibi Osterwald has one good number, "Ragtime Romeo," with the lively dancer Matt Mattox...
...A murdered husband is allowed to stay, in the shape of a grandfather clock, to watch his widow's indiscretions...
...Directed by Joseph Anthony...
...By Lillian Hellman...
...A Hatful of Rain...
...Book by John Latouche and Sam Locke...
...At the Lyceum Theater...
...From the Hebrew of Moshe Shamir...
...The main addict's wife, of course, is pregnant...
...for a while, we are left to believe she has had a miscarriage...
...Directed by Zev Barban...
...In Wilder's Our Town, when the dead woman is allowed to return to earth for her twelfth birthday, she learns something new of the values of life and death...
...At the "Winter Garden...
...The folk drama is the punningly titled Highway Robbery, which shows a new Jewish settlement hoodwinking its way to the materials needed to build a road to its doors...
...At Joan's trial, when she recalls her childhood, for example, her father out of this past talks to the present judges...
...And there is a wealthy spoiled girl who behaves like a cross between a nymphomaniac and a drug-fiend...
...Highway Robbery...
...From the French of Jean Anouilh...
...Despite the work of Faye Emerson, it is hard to see why this piece was pulled from its Paris byways...
...From the French of Albert Husson...
...More serious is the overpressing of Lillian Hellman's play of Joan of Arc...
...Presented by Kermit Bloomgarden...
...We see him in anguish for the drug...
...But, of course, a life is to be judged in its entirety...
...The Lark...
...Sam Leve's sets create an atmosphere...
...and the torrent that pours through A Hatful of Rain leaves the audience low and dry...
...Lyrics by Latouche...
...Joan's martyrdom-her faithfulness to her voices -is the crown of her symbolism...
...Joan, recognizes this by looking not back but ahead to our own day...
...Let us have a revival of his play, with Siobhan McKenna, who last year roused London as Joan...
...We see him beaten by the "pushers" to whom he owes money for his supply...
...Here, we are told that a life should be judged by its highest moment...
...Sets by Mordecai Gorelik...
...But most of the burlesque is dumped in with a steam shovel...
...But the major role of the teacher is in immature hands, and the work on the whole appeals only to those already sympathetic...
...Sets by Sam Leve...
...Mordecai Gorelik's set is graphic...
...At the Longacre Theater...
...Too much pressure in the play means too little response in the audience...
...It's a short step, no more than a stumble, from the funny to the absurd...
...We also see another addict who casually announces that he has just killed a pushcart woman to get drug-money...
...then we discover that all this is merely the husband's picture of what would have happened if the wife had really shot him...
...Except for a few moments like the Oriental fantasy at Grand Central, and for the talents of Carol Channing, the whole thing is an error...
...There is also no sound point in the return, after Joan is burnt, to the episode of the crowning of her "Charlie" as King of France...
...The Heavenly Twins...
...she had $3.16...
...Directed by Cyril Ritchard...
...More expensively excessive along similar lines is The Vamp, which tries to be a satire on the silent films...
...By Michael V. Gazzo...
...Julie Harris works hard with what seems a complete misconception of the role...
...At the President Theater...
...and the girls of the chorus are exceptionally comely...
...No note or feather of a "lark" is discernible in this magpie scolding of the judges, this eaglet cocksureness, this air indeed of the camp-follower rather than the maid...
...The spectacle of drug addiction brings a sort of shuddery chill, and several of the players - Ben Gazzara, Anthony Franciosa, Shelley Winters - act vividly...
...And, for fear that war wounds are not enough to account for the start of the addiction, we are shown a stupid, self-centered father who is ready to take any credit or cash and to give his sons every blame...
...Presented by Jay Julien...
...Presented by Oscar Lerman, Martin Cohen and Alexander Carson...
...Whenever she is about to go too far, the clock strikes...
...twisting the order of events falsifies the values...
...The few sound thoughts in The Lark, indeed, seem like diluted Shaw...
...A Hatful of Rain does this gruesomely showing us the life of a drug addict...
...Sex is the theme coyly overplayed in The Heavenly Twins, a specimen of the obnoxious sort of French farce...
...Shaw in his ending of St...
...The Vamp...
...Much of the story is amusing, and the main figures seem authentic...
...Four other plays pile on their effects until the audience shrugs them off...
...There seems no justification, either, for the confusion of time levels...
...we see Joan triumphant at the coronation, and the curtain falls...
Vol. 38 • December 1955 • No. 48
