On Stage
SHIPLEY, JOSEPH T.
On STAGE By Joseph T Shipley Theater as The Winter Ends The Ziegfeld Follies. Presented by Mark Kroll and Charles Conaway. At the Winter Garden. A Hole in the Head. By Arnold Schul-man. Directed...
...He loses his mistress, abandons the widow, but retains the hotel and his anguished though loving son...
...At the Belasco...
...The first two are highly regarded poppycock...
...Was it worth doing...
...Presented by Cheryl Crawford with William Myers...
...Do we have a sense of ease in contemplating it...
...Directed by Patricia Newhall...
...Broadway playwrights would often be content if they afforded the first of these...
...Tabloid gulpers and comic-strip devotees will find fun where a literate person will sigh over the state of the nation...
...What kind of discomfort does it arouse—a wholesome challenge or a dismal or distasteful droop...
...Good ideas go astray in two other recent additions to the Broadway scene...
...The idea that wealth draws its worth from its proper use, caught amusingly and musically in Finian's Rainbow, here is tangled in a profusion of suddenly sprouting vines and twenty-foot carrots and other nonsense in Washington...
...But the original Parisian Folies would blush to acknowledge so weak a sister, pitifully relying on antiquated tricks...
...Most return to the three questions that echo after Goethe: "What has the critic tried to do...
...A Hole in the Head pictures a widower who wants his freedom...
...The "Ziegfeld girls" are stately, but we are granted no Euclidian view of their ample curves...
...It seems that Professor Benjamin Franklin has learned how to change inert gold into "ert" soil, from which crops grow (for dramatic purposes, instantly) to enormous size...
...what they bring forth, to collect on, is fool's gold...
...By any standard, one is hard put' to find entertainment in the briefly resuscitated Ziegfeld Follies...
...the FBI and the Boy Scouts are treated to smug sneers...
...in fact, the sine qua non of successful drama...
...Good as Gold buries a satire— deeper than the bullion at Fort Knox...
...It is...
...The last of these is not an artistic but a social and ethical question...
...Presented by The Irish Players...
...He has a precocious son of 12, and a mistress upstairs in the cheap Miami hotel he runs but is in danger of losing...
...No one but Johnny and his mother cares what Johnny wanted to do, or how well he has done it...
...By John Patrick...
...How has he succeeded...
...Apart from this discovery, and the cliche professorial insistence that the soil shall be used for peaceful purposes only, Benjamin is as brainless as the teacher of physics to whom he is engaged...
...The whole procedure is as uninspired as expensive...
...Directed by Garson Kanin...
...Three Plays...
...By John Millington Synge...
...There is a tender scene when the shy widow (Lee Grant) and the reluctant widower look together at the hopes and terrors of matrimony...
...Fantasy and humor, of course, may have a freshness or naivete that appeals to "the child in us," but it should be the childlike rather than the childish...
...One feels sorry for Bea Lillie, swaying out over the audience on a crescent moon, slipping garters from spindle shanks to drop on bald heads, with the final garter emerging whence one would expect a brassiere...
...Good as Gold...
...Most quiet was Gerry Jedd in the first playlet as a wife whose husband surprised her by not being dead...
...From the book by Alfred Toombs...
...Every critic at some time ponders the bases of his work...
...At Theater East...
...We—the rest of the world—are concerned with the effect of the work upon us...
...Even here, however, the critic must discriminate: One man's horse-laugh may be another man's frozen frown...
...Off-Broadway at least has genuine metal...
...More particularly, how much does it proffer of the three golden E's: entertainment, enlightenment, exaltation...
...At the Plymouth...
...Entertainment, while trivial, has its valid place...
...Directed by Albert Marre...
...Over at Theater East there is superb dialogue and rich color in Synge's three Irish plays, even though the players seem hell-bent for Killar-ney in their accent and their stir...
...His discovery itself, indeed, belongs in the comics, from which the perennial protesting politico, with a wooden leg hollowed out to hold liquor, has never emerged...
...and in the last a girl (Elspeth March is better here than as the turbulent tinker's dam of the second play) whose mother has seen eight men from her house go down to death in the sea...
...Somewhere along the way the prospectors were misled...
...Save for the widow and the pathetically bright boy, however, the figures are overdrawn caricatures, and the man with whom we are supposed to move in sympathy is, beyond repair, a onesided heel...
...Presented by the Producers Theater...
...The Congressmen are shallow nincompoops...
...Costly this certainly is, adorned with extravagant costumes, equipped with a good dancer, Harold Lang, and a few lively dance routines...
...Enlightenment and exaltation are added bounties...
...When he tries to borrow from his brother, it is suggested that he remarry...
Vol. 40 • March 1957 • No. 12
