Off-Broadway Fare Is Livelier
SHIPLEY, JOSEPH T.
On STAGE By Joseph T. Shipley Off-Broadway Fare Is Livelier Middle of the Night. By Paddy Chayefsky. Directed and presented by Joshua Logan. At the ANTA Theater. The Ponder Heart. By Joseph...
...He is all heart, in the sense that there is no manifest mind...
...Directed by Charles Olsen...
...Adapted and directed by George Tabori...
...The Williams sketches are as good as his longer plays...
...But first two dull items on the gay white way command consideration by their stars and their continuance...
...Even the O'Dowd, who when pixilated conversed with a six-foot rabbit named Harvey, managed to put over some sort of inebriate idea...
...Miss Julie is a more solid study of a woman's pride, humiliation and despair...
...The first brings Shakespeare to a rendezvous interrupted by Queen Elizabeth, with crisp dialogue poking fun at the Bard of Avon...
...There should also be more of Shaw, whose Dark Lady of the Sonnets and The Admirable Bashville at the Cherry Lane are highly amusing pieces, delightfully done...
...Having been endowed by the author with love for humanity and endless funds, he potters around in his Southern town instead of in a home for the feebleminded...
...The Admirable Bashville and Dark Lady of the Sonnets...
...Robinson plays the businessman as though he would rather be Paul Muni playing a lawyer...
...The duels make us feel that they are actual fights, and judicious cuts speed the play to its poignant conclusion...
...And there should be more of Pirandello on Broadway...
...Middle of the Night early utters a warning against soap opera and then disregards it for the rest of the evening...
...Presented by T. Edward Hambleton and Norris Houghton...
...Miss Julie and The Stronger...
...Simply but with understanding, taste and dramatic power, Romeo and Juliet conies alive with the Shakespearewrights...
...The other Broadway play--in a reverse of what FPA used to call "aptronymies"--is entitled The Ponder Heart...
...This story of a middle-aged businessman in love with a young girl is the vehicle for the aging Edward G. Robinsons return to the stage...
...Shaw's beloved-hated Shakespeare is given the works-both works-in a madcap and mock-romantic romp...
...By Joseph Fields and Jerome Chodorov...
...Off Broadway there is livelier fare...
...Presented by Preston-Olsen...
...By August Strindbeig...
...The Stronger is a shrewd tour de force, striking despite Ruth Ford's lack of subtlety in the one speaking part...
...Shakespeare himself is again handled with skill and taste at the Jan Hus House, where the production of Romeo and Juliet has all the fluidity and fire that youth and love can bring...
...I would like here to note a number of lively ventures off-Broadway, any of which will reward the visitor...
...neither the romance nor the fun of the early moments is lost, though the monk who with cowl and candle gives us the Prologue words on the star-crossed lovers sets the more somber mood...
...The Phoenix Theater, which caught its stride with Marcel Marceau and moved into genuine drama with Sam Jaffe in Elmer Rice's The Adding Machine, is now providing a vivid evening of Strindberg...
...Presented by the Shakespearewrights...
...The action swirls swiftly...
...By Bernard Shaw...
...Countess Julie is the one woman in Strindberg's plays who is overcome by life...
...Presented by the Playwrights Company...
...Romeo and Juliet...
...Directed by Brian Shaw...
...The Shaw piece is an amusing spoof of marital attitudes and entanglements...
...The lovers lack what youth itself lacks-experience...
...At the Dramatic Workshop...
...Uncle Ponder merely manages to be played by David Wayne, which is not necessarily a sesame to success...
...The bill I saw offered American Blues by Tennessee Williams, and one-actors by Shaw and Pirandello...
...How in the name of Rip Van Winkle and Pudd'nhead Wilson this creature and his purposeless antics can continue fuddling on the stage may be explained by the fact that Lightnin' struck once before on Broadway...
...Any Saturday night at the Dramatic Workshop, you can see a varied student production...
...However one may respect the actor, one grows sleepy from the play long before the middle of the night...
...But Viveca Lindfors makes Julie's subjection travel a tense and poignant path...
...There is sound and vivid drama at the Phoenix...
...By William Shakespeare...
...Uncle Daniel actually does almost anything but ponder...
...At the Music Box...
...Directed by Saul Colin, Eugene Von Grona, Ilya Motyleff...
...The second, based on Shaw's novel Cashel Byron's Profession, the story of a prizefighter and a lady, in its style and form also makes a vigorous thrust at the romantic drama...
...At the Phoenix Theater...
...indeed, the Lady of Larkspur Lotion is kissing kin to the girls of the later dramas...
...From the story by Eudora Welty...
...At the Cherry Lane Theater...
...his others are more ruthless and successful in the duel of the sexes...
...Repertoire on Saturday Nights...
...Again the best of the season is off-Broadway...
...But that slugaboy Lightnin' turned out to be nobody's fool...
...but Robert Rietz as Romeo has a pleasing mien and a rich voice, and Carlotta Sherwood makes Juliet every little inch a lass eager for life...
...At the Jan Hus Auditorium...
...But the play will appeal to all lovers of the comic-books...
Vol. 39 • March 1956 • No. 11
