MERCHANTS ON DREAM STREET
ZEIGER, HENRY A.
On Stage MERCHANTS ON DREAM STREET BY HENRY A. ZEIGER JL^Froadway is a street of dreams where we settle all too readily for just entertainment, and rarely get even that. There are few experiences...
...Serious examination of such a girl's tortuous history, though, would smash the dream from another angle...
...Leg men drinking rotgut, playing poker, faking stories-and underneath it all their truly idealistic commitment to obtaining a scoop...
...In addition, some of the players do not seem comfortable...
...It could be that time will mellow this production, bringing it that extra measure of grace it now lacks...
...Wisely avoiding that trap, McGiver plays a politician genuinely worried about holding the bag, and White is appropriately weepy about being replaced...
...What the ordinary, successful commercial theater supplies is primarily an environment in which we would like to settle...
...not especially profound, they shared a cheaply cynical, easily sentimental view of life that seems a permanent part of our culture...
...even the nervous gestures of a frightened character must be precise...
...for boredom in the theater is magnified both by our great expectations and our inability to focus on anything but the cause of our discontent...
...Yet there is enough here to hearten the scheming little animal we all have within us...
...Comedians also flourish when they respond to and are caught up in one another's rhythm...
...The commodity playwright has no time to argue about the way of the world, nor can his shorthand be too abrupt or crudely fabricated...
...The world of Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur is immensely attractive to me, and so I found myself forgoing logic, truth and art, and empathizing with the production of The Front Page which has reopened at the Ethel Barrymore Theater...
...Erwin Trowbridge, who struggles along on $40 a week writing greeting card poems for a niggardly boss, is certainly a Depression figure, but I doubt that his dream of making it big at the track has gone stale...
...Several of the actors were still fumbling for their lines on the second night, and nothing kills a supposedly hilarious tagline like an actor who can't remember it...
...As craftsmen, Hecht and Mac-Arthur had a facility for the short, punchy patter of those eternally in the know, plus a gift for drawing a plausible boob with a few well-placed strokes...
...Liberated from inhibition, we can punch the villain in the snoot (without pausing to reflect that the poor man may merely be misunderstood) and clasp the enchantress in our arms (without stopping to calculate the mortgage payments on a suburban split-level...
...On the one side are the worldly wise reporters...
...Burns' entrance is carefully prepared so that we will find in him the ideal the reporters are trying to emulate...
...The other reporters are sufficiently blase, and John McGiver as the Mayor, and Charles White as Sheriff Hartman serve up the precise blend of dafliness and corruption that the authors bestowed on these gentry...
...There are few experiences more depressing than sitting with a crowd of kindred souls earnestly trying to have a good time, while a troupe of sweating, grimacing actors attempts to coax forth a little mirth, and then being overcome by the realization that nothing works, that all the talent, money and sheer hard work lavished on the occasion have failed...
...The conflict in The Front Page is framed by these types...
...Gamblers replace reporters as the heroes of other pleasant American legends, so I am frankly puzzled by the somewhat tired feeling conveyed by the revival of Three Men on a Horse at the Lyceum Theater...
...The present production captures much of the shabby atmosphere...
...Cynical reporters, conniving politicians, dumb cops, nervous anarchists, and yes, even gruff, kind-hearted prostitutes-the authors provided them with their true spiritual home in the grubby press room of the .Criminal Courts Building in Chicago, circa 1928...
...Such personalities are stable...
...The principal actors, with the important exception of Robert Ryan, are very good...
...Yet if once we begin to suspect that there is neither identity nor purpose behind his bright patter, the idyll abruptly ends, and we are back again with those laboring actors, struggling with a universe no one wants to enter...
...Traces of the careful planning the older theater devoted to any dramatic event tend to stick out a bit nowadays, and we often wish that instead of spending so much time setting up a situation, they would get on with it unannounced...
...No convention is more readily available to the conscientious craftsman than that of the Broadway wiseacre whose every sally sums up society...
...We rise from our seats a thousandfold more melancholy than when we sat down, wondering if we will ever smile again...
...Take a trip out to Aqueduct and you can find the dreamers...
...And if it never existed, well, so much the worse for reality...
...Often a single mannerism or trick of speech serves to establish a minor figure...
...It does not upset as the poets do, but instead indulges us with a vision of a land free of the perplexities and abrasive-ness of our commonplace existence...
...Bert Convy displays a little too much boyish enthusiasm and too little skepticism to be the perfect Hildy Johnson, but his energy helps drive the play forward...
...And whatever happened to all the coy virgins of the '40s, flirting around in their lingerie while Donald Cooke mixed martinis...
...Today's young men probably do not yearn to be newshawks (they have, opinions, but seem indifferent to facts), yet the fate of hundreds of middle-aged men was decided by the picture of tough, don't-give-a-damn journalism Hecht and MacArthur painted...
...The solution is patent and has been applied by many dramatists-the girl is basically kind but has a gruff exterior...
...If we do not leave the theater with our souls healed, we at least have been reinvigorated by this demonstration of hardheartedness and bustle in the Chicago of our folklore...
...In catching it so securely, Hecht and MacArthur transcended their original purpose, preserving a vibrant chunk of Americana intact...
...Still, we know the magic exists...
...Comedy depends on a sense of ease in its presentation...
...But these abbreviations must immediately strike us as sound...
...They are funnier for not treating their material condescendingly...
...the mere unadorned unraveling of their destiny is satisfying, and we rejoice in the triumph of the engaging hero over the boorish villain...
...There, everything is clear to us...
...The characters in diversionary theater are abbreviations of our normal selves, mankind refined away to a more comfortable aspect...
...Every good American boy who has ever hung around a poolroom hopes someday to grow up and spend his afternoons in a bar, doping horses...
...No one on the stage of the Lyceum seems quite sure what his partner is going to do...
...I particularly liked James Flavin as one of the reporters...
...When Ryan proves to have less genuine malignancy than several minor figures, scenes designed to exhibit him as the paragon of newsmen droop...
...Ah, that's the life...
...The plot is simple, peppered with just enough melodramatic surprise to keep it moving...
...Then the bar inhabited by Patsy and Irwin, with their talk of the ponies, would be a rewarding place to spend a few hours...
...In short, the dreamland must be current and cannot clash too blatantly with reality...
...Where Ryan stalks around growling, a better Burns would be so convinced of the higher importance of beating the opposition that the epigrams would simply drop out of the side of his mouth...
...A giggle or a minute increase of the pulse is all we ask...
...Nevertheless, if contrivance is sufficiently clever one can be blissfully swept into the mood of the proceedings...
...In the scene where the Mayor strikes the Sheriff off his ticket, it would be easy to camp for cheap laughs...
...Their convictions were all of a piece...
...When it does not occur, we are crushed by a frightening lethargy of spirit or squirm in torment...
...We can enter the auditorium on another evening and as soon as the curtain rises feel ourselves admitted to a far smoother world, where every witticism hits its mark, every girl is entrancing, every young man eloquent and filled with the sap of life...
...Perhaps the structure George Abbott and John Cecil Holm built to house this wish is slightly outmoded...
...his florid face and "I've seen everything" expression, his hat hanging at a nonchalant angle, exactly duplicate the authors' attitudes...
...I am perhaps making this sound mechanical, and too frequently it is...
...The play celebrates the triumph of the archetypal American wise guy over his immortal opponent, H. L. Mencken's booboisie...
...It was a mistake, however, to cast Robert Ryan as that acme of the misanthropic managing editor, Walter Burns...
...To take an obvious example, although men still scheme and toil for gold, Horatio Alger stories cannot be readily peddled...
...Curiously, although the show is directed by Abbott, it bears signs of hasty preparation...
...There is a fashion in such matters, and the unwary merchant is often caught with the dross of last year's goods...
...Complexity is banished: The mother-in-law nags, the boss proves irascible, the girlfriend cooperates-and that's all they do...
...In the end, nothing much has happened, but the flow of events has allowed the authors to parade their world before our eyes...
...Thus, stage prostitutes traditionally have hearts of gold, yet if that is all they have we may start wondering how they got into the business in the first place...
...But in selling us our daydreams, the dealer must be cautious...
...on the other, clumsy sheriffs and bumbling mayors, trying to conceal a lifetime of public folly...
Vol. 52 • November 1969 • No. 21
