On Stage
SHIPLEY, JOSEPH T.
On STAGE By Joseph T Shipley The Season In Full Swing The Family Reunion. By T. S. Eliot. Directed by Stuart Vaughan. Set by Norris Houghton. Presented by T. Edward Hambleton and Norris...
...The Pleasure of His Company is the story of a world-rover, thrice married and thrice divorced, who drops in for his daughter's wedding and carries off the girl, under the groom's nose, for a wander-year with her dashing father...
...At the National Theater...
...and Fritz Weaver as Harry fails to win our sympathy for his exaggerated dole and dread...
...some of the lyrics are deft and literate...
...Directed by Walter Kerr...
...But The Golden Six alters the facts of history to present more strongly its essence...
...The result is a succession of episodes, each powerful or bitterly ironic in itself, but lacking dramatic unity...
...The Golden Six, beginning with Augustus chronicles the fall of several Emperors...
...Paul Mann makes Augustus more of a weary and confused old man than a regal ruler...
...And, watching this play, thought turns inevitably to a land today where the leaders reward with death those that have helped them to power, where the ruler is the father, almost the god, and the god exalts those that are being readied to fall...
...By Harry Kurnitz...
...He succeeds his nephew Caligula on the throne as the play comes to its end...
...We watch travesties of Indians, pirates, ancient Egyptians—but, alas, as seen by the comic-strip mind...
...Anderson has her poison the aging Emperor lest his weak and questioning senescence foil her imperial plans...
...At the Phoenix Theater...
...Whether he actually pushed his late wife overboard during a Channel crossing, or whether he is now confusing the desire and the deed we do not learn But from his lordly level he looks upon all others unable to climb to the plane of his suffering Only his youngest aunt Agatha-who had once spun web of love with her brother-in-law, Harry's father_ran at times glimpse wha clouds of furies swirl in Harry's soul...
...Presented by Joel Spector and Sylvia Harris...
...When Livia died, Tiberius had eight more years to rule...
...Livia skulks like the genie of autocratic greed for power, plotting, poisoning, destroying all that might even stand in the way of the despot...
...Then came the comics...
...With Feeling...
...Directed by Jerome Chodorov...
...At the Lunt-Fontanne Theater...
...As the TV producer, Sam Levene works hard, but he has been given only old gags and dragged-in word-play...
...Presented by Frederick Brisson and the Playwrights' Company...
...A better playwright has a more provocative play in The Golden Six...
...Ivar Lissner, in The Caesars, says simply...
...Choreography by Agnes de Mille...
...Taken for what it is, it's fun...
...For Julie is the naive young thing from the South whose photographic memory has run her up to $100,000 on the quiz show that gives the play its name...
...The play is literate and lively, with deft and natural dialogue, and consummate performances...
...Presented by Martin Gabel and Henry Margolis...
...Although now receiving its New York premiere, The Family Reunion is not new, and Eliot has admitted that his attempt to bring the Furies of Aeschylus into an English drawing room has not been attended by complete success...
...Directed by Warner LeRoy...
...The music is excellent...
...It is not a drama of single drive...
...The Golden Six...
...The rest of the family bickers and struts about until the dowager Harry's mother dies offstage as the candles on her birthday are blown and Harry goes off again to face his torment...
...The play pictures the process of winning her back, so that the conductor can have another steady engagement...
...Once More...
...By Samuel Taylor with Cornelia Otis Skinner...
...The Waste Land) has endeavored to fuse the present and the past...
...Simply set, the play manages to suggest the surge and sweep of imperial ambitions and mad Emperors...
...In spite of these reservations, Elaine Stritch is pleasing in a sort of Ethel Merman role, Don Ameche effective as the rough movie director who takes the girl from her society fiance...
...On STAGE By Joseph T Shipley The Season In Full Swing The Family Reunion...
...Directed by George Axelrod...
...but Alvin Epstein superbly captures the cunning and intelligence, with a touch of sincere desire for simplicity, within the limping and stuttering Claudius...
...Then we watch the brute Tiberius rule, and the effeminate monster Caligula each destroying all possible rivals, no matter how closely related Of the golden six Claudius alone survives his limp, stammer and moronic air-partly laid on over a deeper cunning-keeping him in the scorn of the rulers, hence keeping him alive...
...Anderson makes her drifted outlast him and his successor Caligula whose end she plots Only when Claudius, newly crowned' stands ready to dispose of her does he minister to herself the death she has already dealt to many others...
...Goldilocks...
...These are some of the grim parallels caught in Maxwell Andersons play...
...At the Longacre Theater...
...In Once More, With Feeling, Walter Matthau, as his manager, scores a triumph over a musical conductor who is a genius but a temperamental firebrand...
...recalls the best musicals of the turn of the century, when children and adults alike adored The Top of the World, Toyland and others...
...Likewise mediocre, but scheduled for a good run, is Make a Million, which starts as a satire on TV but gets sidetracked when Julie gets pregnant...
...In the poem, his purpose was to refuse the chaos and the lack of values in our own day...
...Viveca Lindfors moves with power and beauty as the young Livia —a grandmother when we first see her, but still young—then with consummate skill maintains through the aging years the sense of burning will and indomitable hold of power...
...Historically it was Claudius who set Livia among the gods...
...Anderson has altered history here and there (more than Shakespeare ever did) to fit his thesis...
...Matthau's superb timing and many excellent lines carry the evening...
...Directed by Cyril Ritchard...
...Sets by Peter Larkin...
...and a husband must be found for her before she next goes on the air...
...A Robert Whitehead production presented by the Producers Theater...
...In the play, his effect has been to confuse the audience...
...Nicholas Joy and Dorothy Sands are amusing as relatives who completely lack understanding of the depths of emotion around...
...Lyrics by the Kerrs and Joan Ford...
...Presented by Mr...
...At the Playhouse...
...Make Million...
...Book by Walter and Jean Ken...
...But whereas Julius Caesar or Richard III follows a single career to its disastrous end...
...But most of them—including Lillian Gish as Agatha—seem rather reciting than talking...
...Cornelia Otis Skinner is superb in all ranges as his wife—though now the wife of a solid citizen (a bit envious of Poole) played by Walter Abel...
...We watch the old Augustus planning to preserve the Empire...
...Presented by T. Edward Hambleton and Norris Houghton...
...By Maxwell Anderson...
...Dolores Hart plays the daughter in a golden dream, and George Peppard makes real the bewildered young man who is left behind...
...Charlie Ruggles as a rebellious grandfather completes the fine quartet of older folks...
...By that time, its unity—not of action but of theme—has been made clear...
...The dance of Goldilocks and the Bear—"Who been sitting in my chair...
...As Biddeford Poole, the man who knows that a life of pleasure is not easy to lead, though he leads it, Cyril Ritchard's excellent performance wins our grudging admiration for the hedonistic scamp...
...At the York Playhouse...
...The only one who can even partly control him is his ex-wife, an exharpist now teaching in a small college, and engaged to its president...
...Leon Belasco is also excellent, as two violinists named Gendel...
...And The Golden Six soberly shows that command, even undesired, drives men to ruthless cruelty to perpetuate command...
...The elaborate and lively scenes of Goldilocks take place on an early movie-lot (it was really just an empty lot, in those days...
...Harry, Lord Monchensy, brings a tortured spirit...
...By Norman Barasch and Carroll Moore...
...LeRoy and Norman Twain...
...Augustus dies in Livia's arms...
...They combine in the best team work of the new season, with Cyril Ritchard crowning a play that will give many audiences the pleasure of his company...
...In two long soliloquies of Claudius, and in the persisting figure of the ambitious Livia, the oft-repeated lesson is pressed home that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely...
...Russell Nype as that scion of wealth, and Pat Stanley dancing her way along in quest of love, also help...
...Of the company assembled—in this first of a series of plays by Nobel Prize winners which the Phoenix will present this season—Florence Reed as the mother seems most in command of her role...
...but more like a "history play" in the Shakespearean sense...
...Set in the San Francisco home of the girl, Jessica, with her mother and step-father, it shows the mother slipping back under the spell of the playboy, then recoiling as she recognizes the false lure which captures and captivates the daughter...
...Livia as the persisting evil of despotism lingers still...
...Russia, protesting the same reason, has announced the same goal...
...One can understand why the Play-wrights' Company allowed its distinguished member Maxwell Anderson to present this drama off Broadway...
...Arlene Frances does an excellent job calming the conductor, but unfortunately the suave Joseph Cotten captures neither his genius nor his fits of passion...
...Summoned back to the family's country house in the North of England for his mother's birthday...
...Among the "golden six"—his grandsons and his wife's sons by her first marriage -he has to choose the most likely successor...
...Music by Leroy Anderson...
...The Pleasure of His Company...
...IT is easy to see that Goldilocks is not another Oklahoma...
...The one more adult movement, "the Pussy-Foot," was distasteful to me, for all its intricate pattern...
...The large cast—from the guards and the slave girls, virgins the Empress brings to bare themselves before their Lord so that he may pick the night's companion, to the young republicans and the three Emperors—is vividly effective...
...Even in her death she takes command...
...The Family Reunion is one of several plays in which T. S. Eliot (as in the poem that first brought him fame...
...Rome, protesting that she was fighting in self-defense, conquered the world...
Vol. 41 • November 1958 • No. 41
