On Stage
SHIPLEY, JOSEPH T.
By Joseph T. Shipley Two Merry Hits And a Tangled Miss Auntie Mame. By Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee. From the book by Patrick Dennis. Directed by Morton da Costa. Presented by Robert Fryer...
...But as entertainment the Russell is a roar and the Pidgeon is a rare bird...
...The play we watch is a grab-bag from which Roz Russell pulls prize after amusing prize...
...such plot as the play has concerns the eventual mating of the Biddle boodle with the Duke ducats...
...At the Lyceum Theater...
...After these two completely uninhibited characters, one wishes Girls of Summer were less confused in its portrait of a woman so repressed she seems tied in knots...
...From the book My Philadelphia Father, by Cordelia Drexel Biddle and Mr...
...There's little connection between the party favors, but there's one party we constantly favor: the lithe and lovely Rosalind...
...The riproaring millionaire—whose butler always comes in inquiring: "You yelled, sir...
...The laughs remain with Auntie Mame and the millionaire...
...Old Man Biddle, like Auntie Mame, gives little evidence of serious concern or conscious social direction...
...Biddle is hauling it along with his bit...
...In between, she has made confetti out of her salesbook in a day as a Macy's clerk, turned a telephone switchboard into a maze, amazed Southern society by catching a fox and a Southern husband, and worn a number of bewitching costumes...
...he is really a lost soul seeking a woman who'll be his permanent mate...
...Auntie Mame rescues him and gives them their comeuppance...
...At the school to which she sends him, the boys and girls, in nudist garb, learn (by imitation) the mating processes of fishes—which is perhaps why, when Nephew grows up, he falls in love with a conventional, cooped-up girl from a family of Connecticut anti-Semites...
...There are moments when many folks might like to maim Auntie Mame, but it is a cold customer indeed who does not succumb to Roz Russell...
...Shelley Winters makes Hilda an engaging lass, but the psychological broth is too cooked up...
...By N. Richard Nash...
...Presented by Cheryl Crawford...
...personally, however, they progress from confusion to muddle to mess...
...The Happiest Millionaire...
...Before that...
...Crichton...
...It is not the story that matters, however, but the cavorting of irrepressible and unpredictable Anthony J. Drexel Biddle, who loves his family without recognizing that he dominates them, who combines the propriety of Philadelphia with the perversity of the Latin Quarter and the pigheadedness of Devil's Row...
...Then a fellow they scorn for his frail physique masters them all with ju jitsu...
...Indeed, it is not until the battle of the Biddies and the Dukes that the play grows really lively...
...The author has endowed his characters with keen power to analyze each other...
...Benjamin Duke enter the scatterbrained household...
...This champion is Angier Duke, of the tobacco Dukes...
...At the Broadhurst Theater...
...The fellow turns out to be as tangled as everyone else, so he and Hilda put their knots together and try for happiness...
...Auntie Mame's respectable brother, now dead, left her with considerable foreboding the care of her young nephew...
...There's a scatterbrained but warmhearted "advanced woman" named Auntie Mame, brought to life by a winsome lass named Rosalind Russell...
...Auntie Mame in Philadelphia, of the male sex and with a million dollars, is Anthony J. Drexel Biddle— if not the happiest, then surely the most eccentric millionaire...
...Presented by Robert Fryer and Lawrence Carr...
...At the Longacre Theater...
...Her parties of pie-eyed stars and pickled rattlesnake are the talk of the town and just the thing to teach a growing nephew la joie de vivre and a sense of human irresponsibility...
...It is in that role that the awakened Hilda sees herself as the curtain falls on the collapse of Binnie's dream...
...Nothing dismays the man, but there is a strong jerk on the reins when the quick eye and competent hand of Mrs...
...out of his "alligatorium" roll live amphibia...
...it is when she is trying to protect Binnie from a forthright fellow that her own heart breaks through...
...The man who behaves like an uninhibited and pleasure-bound son of wealth turns out to be vacationing from his job of putting up prefabricated houses...
...Girls of Summer...
...Hilda, earnestly mothering her little sister Binnie, locks the doors to her own experience...
...By Kyle Crichton...
...In charming contrast is Ruth Matteson, as his wife...
...Directed and presented by Howard Erskine and Joseph Hayes...
...Ruth White is amusing as the lady who built Duke University with her own two hands and isn't tired...
...His daughter wears boxing gloves and distributes black eyes...
...she quietly persuades us of what every woman knows, twisting the bull to her gentler purposes...
...is superbly depicted by Walter Pidgeon, who makes him seem a real person in the midst of the unbelievable goings-on...
Vol. 40 • January 1957 • No. 1
