On Stage
SHIPLEY, JOSEPH T.
On STAGE By Joseph T. Shipley A Mild Musical And a Great Actress Pipe Dream. Music by Richard Rodgers. Book and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II. Based on the novel Sweet Thursday, by John...
...All at once you love her" sweetens the amorous crooning...
...The players have personality, but they are not woven into a unit, and no one of them can carry a show...
...Directed by Harold Clurman...
...The Theater Wing presented Tore Segelke...
...She smiles on the two youngsters with whom she does a song and dance with such motherly solicitude, and she shepherds her girls with such devoted care, that she almost makes her house seem respectable...
...Since a cowboy ambled across a cornfield some years ago, singing "Oh, what a beautiful morning...
...Based on the novel Sweet Thursday, by John Steinbeck...
...Pre-eminent in her own land, Tore Segelke has been hailed throughout Europe...
...She thus points, in truth, to the musical's major flaw: Everyone is just too good to be really lively...
...Louise Troy, who flips back her dressing-gown to expose her leg as she answers the phone in "the happiest house on the block," holds the attention as vividly for her moment as the "madame" of that house, the beaming and beamy Helen Traubel...
...Pipe Dream dispenses with chorus altogether: there are, of course, singing and dancing groups, but all forty on stage are listed separately on the program...
...A rare treat was offered to a fortunate few at the President Theater the other day through the good graces of the Theater Wing, which during the war and after has been doing a splendid job for the theater and the country...
...On STAGE By Joseph T. Shipley A Mild Musical - And a Great Actress Pipe Dream...
...Intelligence and taste always mark the work of this team...
...musicals have tended not to open with the welcoming chorus...
...When she was through, Helen Hayes was not the only one to cry "Bravo...
...And each is a personality...
...Miss Traubel, whose voice has not yet made the trip from Metropolitan Opera to musical comedy, looks upon everyone as though she's thinking, "It's fun to be here...
...Opening in what might seem a most unmusical place, a marine biological laboratory featuring octopuses and starfish, the play meanders along unusual paths??with the usual sweetscented story...
...another song looks at life as a journey we are all taking on "A lopsided bus...
...leading lady of the Norwegian theater...
...As rich as Miss Segelke's facial and bodily expression is the quality of her voice, which can plead, mock, pour hatred, plan revenge, in ways that lift the language to full emotional communication...
...She has smashed a store window to get the doughnuts inside, but is not prosecuted by the store owner, gets a home with the madame--still all pure!--the heart of Doc, and a loan of $25 from the town detective...
...At the Shubert Theater...
...In her own tongue, her main presentation was drawn from Anouilhs Medea, in which a wide range of emotions was in complete control, as the audience wascompletely in her power...
...At the Paris festival, she stood on the stage alone and won the highest acclaim...
...It is a story that takes little time to tell, as two noble folk, each feeling unworthy of the other, fall in love...
...We were all enriched, thanks to Theater Wing, by this brief contact with Tore Segelke...
...All this nobility hardly makes for excitement, nor has the direction stirred up the treacly stew...
...Amellow musical smiles on Broadway in Rodgers and Hammerstein's Pipe Dream...
...William Johnson, as the "doc" who idles along in the lab until love bumps him into work, would have made a matinee idol in the days of histriolatry...
...In Cannery Row, California--at any rate, in a pipe dream--even the denizens of the flophouses are unselfish souls, and the girls in the happy house make sin look like true service...
...they move for the time with sweet rather than tart diversion, but Pipe Dream should drift for some mellow moons over Broadway...
...more lengthily captures our eye...
...But there is a pleasant offbeat stir in the capers of the assortment of wastrels, and several songs hit high on the Rodgers and Hammerstein list...
...Bravo...
...Presented by Rodgers and Hammer stein...
...and we share her enjoyment...
...For us, she told Hans Christian Andersen's sad story of "The Little Match Girl" in English with touching tenderness...
...All kinds of people and things' builds philosophy out of a starfish...
...In the play, he is as lovable a soul as sweet little Suzy, who has preserved her purity while roaming the countryside...
Vol. 38 • December 1955 • No. 50
