On Stage
SHIPLEY, JOSEPH T.
ON STAGE By Joseph T Shipley Freud, Frolics and Children's Fun Comes a Day. By Speed Lamkin. Directed by Robert Mulligan. Presented by Cheryl Crawford and Alan Pakula. At the Ambassador...
...Some of the longer sketches are tiresome or tawdry, like that of the man who comes to be fed just as the restaurant is closing...
...La Plume de ma Tante, from Paris via London, is a more crackling, rapid-fire review...
...I shan't tell what happens at the Paris street latrine...
...and his first wife drops in to warn the new bride of his perverted taste in sex...
...Repertory for Children (Arabian Nights, Peter and the Wolf, The Red Dragon...
...a tramp wakes up: it's his bald head...
...The tone of the play is set in almost the opening words, as the son's pal queries: "Did you ever see your sister naked...
...At the Barbizon-Plaza Theater...
...By and with Robert Dhery...
...Saturday afternoons at the Cricket Theater...
...Salad Days has been given a gay dressing and is a delightful dish...
...There are roses and violets in the music-drama...
...In the decaying mansion of their former prosperity, instead of helping daughter Caroline marry the salesman she loves, Isabel pushes her into the arms of the wealthiest up-and-comer of the community...
...ON STAGE By Joseph T Shipley Freud, Frolics and Children's Fun Comes a Day...
...Judith Anderson as usual is intense, but to less than usual effect...
...The Merri-Mimes...
...Caroline runs off to marry the salesman, with whom she has been spending her weekends...
...Two workers at a manhole: one down, one delaying girls for the worm's eye view-along comes a Scot in kilties...
...Isabel Lawton had left the aviator she loved to marry security...
...Naw.-Who wants to see his own family naked...
...English lyrics by Ross Parker...
...To Gian-Carlo Menotti's recent Maria Golovin, the audience echoed the cry...
...In spite of Isabel's learning this, he would get her daughter too-save that in the dramatic nick o' time he gets a fit on the Lawton lawn and the finally shocked Isabel phones for the police...
...Presented by David Merrick and Joseph Kipness...
...It is a relief to turn to two light revues, roundabout come to New York...
...the audience preferred forget-Menotti...
...Off-Broadway groups must foster this...
...A hen cackling from its egg...
...Their teen-age son is a rebellious uncouth semi-delinquent...
...but the rest of the play tries to strip their souls...
...To watch them (already inured to movies and television) wide-eyed before real persons and imagined props playing stories of the Arabian Nights, is a delight...
...The freshness of fancy in the production responds to the freshness of response in the new audience...
...At the Royale Theater...
...By Julian Slade and Dorothy Reynolds...
...Presented by Blanche Marvin...
...La Plume de ma Tante...
...Next night Comes a Day sent Freud crawling even deeper into his grave, as the sins of the mothers leered out to punish the children...
...In spite of gloom and lapses, I believe in the theater...
...The man Isabel has picked for her daughter, Tydings Glenn, has cut off the head of the Lawton boy's pet crow and drowned a dog in a bathtub...
...I feel that one way of restoring drama to its place as a positive force in our lives is through the early development of the habit of playgoing...
...At the Ambassador Theater...
...Very funny indeed is the full-dress ball with incongruous dancing couples and parts of costumes that change wearers as they flow...
...This is a better aspect of youth than what recent playwrights have been plucking out of Freud...
...Again Freud would wince...
...The boy, to show that he forgives his mother, picks up his algebra book...
...There is sex enough in the tale, but no warmth of human sympathy in the telling...
...The dozen actors have flimsy material to work with, but they work with a light-handed humor that runs from miming to word-play, in a medley of merriment and magic...
...or the striptease satire that catches the ecdysiast's zipper but little else either American or French...
...It is encouraging to find tots four years of age and older delighting in the work of Blanche Marvin's Merri-Mimes...
...And Robert Dhery, organizer and M. C. of the evening, is so genial a comic we can almost forgive his lapses...
...Nearest to touching is Arthur O'Connell, as the ineffectual Charley...
...The audience shudders throughout...
...Another high point: the monks (Les Freres Jacques) pulling chimes-ropes shuffle into a galumphing dance...
...Presented by Nicholas Benton and Stanley Flink...
...Blackouts flit by: a man up the steps to board a plane, but there is no plane, so he twirls his bow tie and takes off...
...Salad Days...
...Their work is to play, in the London parks, a piano that makes all hearers dance...
...It seems Tydings' mother was a whore, and what he had hated in her must be expiated through all the women he meets...
...THE THEATER this year, following the advice of Leslie Fiedler, has certainly heen crying No...
...Salad Days, from England via Canada, is a fresh and frolicsome fancy, which takes two youngsters from college to work, marriage and flying saucers...
...Then wealthy Charley Lawton "played her dirty"-he lost his fortune...
...As the sick sadist, George C. Scott makes his trouble unmistakably clear...
...Charley meanwhile has taken to drink, to escape his bitter wife's nagging...
...Music by Gerard Calvi...
Vol. 41 • November 1958 • No. 63
