On Stage
SHIPLEY, JOSEPH T.
On STAGE By Joseph T. Shipley The New Season Hits Its Stride Heartbreak House. By Bernard Shaw Directed by Harold Clurman. Presented by Maurice Evans and Robert L. Joseph. At the Billy Rose...
...Hecklers challenge Willie's motives...
...Corny and contrived, the play pumps laughter like a gasoline pump—if you can fall into its mood of unbelievable farce...
...Cheri, as the grown but never grown-up Frederick is called, is completely spoiled, self-centered, complacent and contempitible...
...Cheri...
...Clifton James makes Willie intimately credible...
...But the computer is not given shore leave, and when its conclusions are flashed from the ship anchored in the harbor to the three boys on shore, the Navy starts a hunt for the "spies...
...Salome Jens snares well the simple beauty of Deirdre, and the other women come alive, despite the slow direction...
...For all the good work of Kim Stanley as the aging cocotte in love with the young blatherskite, the most entertaining element of the show is the spread of the absurd costumes and overdecorated rooms of the fading French demi-monde...
...But the twin peaks of the early season are Shakespeare's Much Ado and Shaw's biting Heart-break House...
...She falls in love with the big bad boy, falls in with their scheme and, when there seems no other way of placating papa Admiral, falls into the Grand Canal...
...Presented by Michel Bouche, Arnold M. Brockman, and Iris Michaels...
...All the King's Men...
...At the Billy Rose Theater...
...SHAW HAS NOW come beside Shakespeare to dominate the season...
...A consummate cast presents the Shavian barbs...
...The Sol Hurok International Series at the Winter Garden...
...At the end, Willie has gone, but the hospital stands...
...the speaker says what counts is not the background but the fact: Here is a splendid hospital...
...By flash-backs we get the background: the tangled life of Willie, his enemies and his cronies...
...Heartbreak House, for all its seemingly desultory talk, presses home a warning as important now as it was in 1920: Heedlessness in any land will bring disaster...
...Maurice Evans, at his best as the 88-year-old Captin Shot-over, is made up to resemble Shaw...
...We are not brought to sympathy with him or anyone, and by the time the supposedly sad moments come, we are beyond any caring...
...Directed by Mark Schoenberg...
...There is beauty in Synge's retelling of Ireland's sad legend of Deirdre, the young beauty whom an old king coveted, but who went with the young man of her choice for seven happy years, until the old king's vengeance took them to the grave...
...Adapted by Anita Loos from stories by Colette...
...Golden Fleecing...
...The invincible Sol Hurok has been scoring again, at top form: the Philippine Dance Company displayed superb deftness and exotic beauty: the Polish Folk Ballet is another Hurok triumph...
...John Ragin is intense in the role of the tortured man who was a reporter and then Willie's man Friday...
...Presented by Courtney Burr and Gilbert Miller...
...The loneliness of every mortal, except at the core of love, is one of the moods that shines through the beauty of Deirdre of the Sorrows...
...Cheri's mother, Cheri's mistress, and the mother of the girl he marries for her money are all successful cocottes...
...Directed by Abe Burrows...
...By John M. Synge...
...Synge has woven the story with his most tender dialogue, the earthy speech of the people rising to poetry...
...The question of values remains unanswered...
...At the East 74th Street Theater...
...A boss, but who would not be...
...Pamela Brown is most fetching as his colonial daughter: Diana Wynyard as his domestic daughter is in sweet command...
...By Robert Penn Warren...
...Fast and fantastic farce comes with the "golden fleecing" that three bright Navy boys give to the roulette wheel in Venice with a new and guaranteed fool-proof system: their' plays are calculated by an electronic computer...
...At Henry Miller's Theater...
...Presented by Andre Gregory, Pirie Macdonald, and Neil Smith...
...At the Morosco Theater...
...Diane Cilento daintily yet shrewdly exemplifies Young England, and unites it with the traditions of Old England (as exemplified by the Captain), pointing the way to continuing vitality in the land...
...All the King's Men is the second of the season's political plays, for the man meant by "Willie Stark" is Huey Long...
...Presented by the Playwrights Company and Robert Lewis...
...In short, Warren makes the dictator human, even as you and I. A rosy-hued look at Long, if not a whitewash...
...Do you think the laws of God will be suspended in favor of England because you were born in it...
...The Admiral has the hotel room under the one which the boys are using...
...Hopes for the dramatization of Colette's sensitive stories, when Cheri came, faded with the vulgar display that strikes and offends the eye and mind...
...Warren made the story a novel, a movie and three times a play...
...he does not get mixed with the con game until his daughter gets off the elevator at the wrong floor...
...Deirdre of the Sorrows...
...The play begins with a speech at the dedication of Willie's pet hospital...
...Sam Levene makes businessman Mangan too much the Jew, and Alan Webb is too weak as the liberal...
...At the Gate Theater...
...Now we see a sinner, but who is not...
...Dances...
Vol. 42 • November 1959 • No. 40
