BROADWAY BALANCE SHEET
Funke, Lewis
Broadway Balance Sheet By Lewis Funke WHEN I last reported to readers of The Progressive, I presented a sort of periscopic view of the horizon for the Broadway theater season of 1952-53. Now, with...
...The play that drew the most unequivocally enthusiastic reception of the season was William Inge's Picnic...
...The Children's Hour took on deeper significance, for the world had come to know the viciousness of false charges, the damage that such charges can wreak upon the lives of those involved...
...In New York, with Rex Harrison and Lilli Palmer in the chief roles, it has repeated its foreign success...
...This is the same production that was taken to Europe last summer with the blessing of the State Department and won unstinted laurels in Germany and England...
...There were one-man shows for heady divertissement and "readings" from Dickens and Stephen Vincent Benet...
...But her loyal fans made her stay a highly successful one...
...that it had ample scope and variety...
...Picnic, presented by the Theater Guild, in association with Joshua Logan, doesn't have much of a tale to tell...
...Life, says Williams, can be conquered provided one has the will to live bravely or without regret...
...If an observer were so inclined, he could once again join the wailing chorus...
...What he is saying is that life is cruel...
...Indeed, The Children's Hour is one of those timeless pieces that will be as pertinent in 1973 as it is now...
...An excellent actor, Williams was not quite so successful in his new program as he was previously when he presented excerpts from a variety of Dickens' works...
...LEWIS FUNKE, drama editor for the New York Times during the past eight years, conducts the weekly column, "News and Gossip of the Rialto," for that paper...
...In addition to his attractiveness, he displayed a convincing stage presence, a burning sincerity, and a flexible, resonant voice...
...Massey and Miss Anderson, along with Power, made the rendition a memorable one...
...Williams, attired in formal cutaway, with a red geranium in his lapel, whiskers on his face, and looking much as the British novelist probably did on his triumphal reading tours, gave a rendition of Bleak House...
...Through the dull summer months Wish You Were Here continued to undergo alteration, and by September it had been turned from a flop into a first-rate hit, one of those rare feats of faith plus word-of-mouth advertising by the satisfied customers who overruled the critics...
...Wish You Were Here is an elaborate production, boasting, of all things, a "live" swimming pool on the stage, built at a cost of about $15,000...
...Under Miss Hellman's own directorial hand, the play has taut performances by Kim Hunter and Patricia Neal, portraying the roles of the school teachers, and Iris Mann, a brilliant youngster, has won bravos for a savage interpretation of the malicious child...
...Ill In February, the New York City Center of Drama and Music offered the first of its three-play series, a somewhat jazzed-up production of Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost...
...However, such was not its destiny...
...In brief, there was something for everyman's taste, and the man with catholic taste could have had himself a really royal year of theater-going...
...That Miller was thinking of contemporary events when he was fashioning The Crucible is true, of course, but hardly a reference to our times is in evidence...
...One of the outstanding events of the season came toward the end of January with the premiere of Arthur Miller's The Crucible...
...Miss Davis, praised for courage, was not complimented for either her singing or her dancing...
...The Theatre Guild, which had been responsible for importing The Millionairess, returned to the lists in January with another importation, Peter Ustinov's The Love of Four Colonels...
...justifiable revivals of classics 96and semi-classics...
...The direction was somewhat youthful in concept, the company definitely immature in handling the lines...
...Power deserved the praise...
...Two days after the opening of Camino Real, spring came, and so did all sorts of dire things...
...It is without plot or other regulation accouterments...
...The Children's Hour, despite its age, found an appreciative audience and proved once again that a play does not have to solve the difficulties of the cosmos to be an important contribution to theatrical literature...
...For Inge this is his second straight triumph...
...Hitherto celebrated for his Shakespearean creations and his playing of Shaw, he here plays the role of a wicked husband bent on murdering his wife in a fine psychological melodrama...
...The Dickens fans, however, had a splendid time...
...He can act so well that several of the town's more sedate reviewers practically did cartwheels over the discovery...
...humor arising out of situation and not from gags alone...
...in the opinion of others, it is ennobling...
...Exuberant, energetic, ingratiating, she dominates the performance...
...Before October was torn from the calendar, two other events of note took place...
...By all the rules of the modern theater, the show should have folded by the weekend...
...It has a story that makes sense—two girls from Ohio trying to make good in New York and their sundry adventures on the way...
...Three nights after the opening of The Love of Four Colonels, New York took on an especially festive air with the arrival of Danny Kaye at that erstwhile citadel of vaudeville, the venerable Palace Theater...
...Absent from the theater since her appearance in John van Druten's delightful The Voice of the Turtle, M argaret Sullavan chose Terence Rattigan's The Deep Blue Sea for her return early in November...
...Miller, as any follower of the theater knows, is a playwright whose devotion to the serious theater is sincere...
...Now, with only two musical productions to be heard from, the time has come to review the Broadway parade that has passed the critical reviewing stand...
...But what attracted admiration to Picnic is the gallery of diverse characters in a small Kansas town...
...It rambles and is loquacious, but it is sharp and biting, too, merry and raucously funny in its jabs at marriage, the pursuing female, and society...
...The only comparatively bright spot was Em-lyn Williams' return as Charles Dickens...
...Matters perked up again, however, with the bow of George Axelrod's The Seven Year Itch...
...In the opinion of some, his concept is depraved...
...II Two events in December marked the month for an assortment of theater-goers...
...The first entrant in the Rialto Sweepstakes came in on June 25, 1952...
...The trouble with Williams' play, it seems to me, is that in attempting an unconventional approach, in which symbolism abounds at every turn of phrase, he has obscured his fundamental ideas...
...A graduate of the New York public schools and New York University, he has served the Times in a variety of posts during the past 16 years...
...It is generally agreed that Wonderful Town, based on the play, My Sister Eileen, is the best musical since the rowdily wonderful Guys and Dolls...
...his first was Come Back, Little Sheba...
...Under different supervision and with a highly professional cast, headed by the English actor, Barry Jones, the Center's second production was much happier—an hilarious offering of Shaw's rarely performed Misalliance...
...Back in 1934 when it appeared, it was a self-contained story about two school teachers whose lives were destroyed by the false accusation of a malicious child...
...Katharine Hepburn arrived in the late Bernard Shaw's The Millionairess, and Maurice Evans took the boards in Frederick Knott's Dial M for Murder...
...Miss Davis came to the theater under a heavy barrage of advance publicity...
...Everything she does seems natural and fetching...
...Police, mounted and on foot, were required to maintain order in the streets on opening night, and inside the Palace it seemed that all of the world of showbusiness had turned out to greet the great and versatile star...
...But, with the exception of one critic, Wish You Were Here failed to impress the men in the judging box...
...Had Miller devoted a little more attention to his characters as human beings, there is no doubt in my mind that The Crucible would have taken its place alongside Death of a Salesman as one of the truly great plays of this generation...
...It was a performance in the true sense of the word...
...All along the way to Broadway some piece of madness took place in connection with the production...
...Going to the sourcebooks of American history, Miller recreates in The Crucible the story of the Salem witchhunts...
...Another casualty was Moss Hart's The Climate of Eden, which he based on Edgar Mittelholzer's novel, Shadows Move Among Them...
...Camino Real does not tell a conventional story...
...All of them are rounded, full-blooded personalities, and they give the play a force and vitality that is magnetic...
...When Kaye concluded his engagement, not a record at the Palace was left standing...
...Dial M for Murder proved itself an excellent representative of its breed and went on to an exceptionally prosperous run...
...The Crucible stands on its own two feet as an indictment of injustice in any period of history...
...March brought revival of George Gershwin's great folk opera, Porgy and Bess...
...Unfortunately, though Miller's play carries tremendous force in its dissection of mass fear and hysteria, it lacks a human warmth to carry it over into the ranks of great drama...
...His work has the inestimable stamp of integrity, and in The Crucible this virtue is again in evidence...
...sophisticated ballet work and a cast that believes in what it is doing all the way...
...Basically it deals with a young girl who falls in love and is seduced by an erstwhile football hero...
...A young playwright, Laurents first attracted attention shortly after the war with his Home of the Brave...
...The final curtain had hardly descended on opening night before the yeas and nays had mounted their respective barricades...
...As for The Children's Hour, it has proved itself of enduring worth...
...There was only a scattering of dissents for the play, and it became the season's third success...
...But when it opened on the Main Stem, all the efforts had been in vain...
...No other art depends upon immediate communication as does the theater...
...A British soap opera, overwrought and unconvincing, this Rattigan play held on for a while chiefly because of its star's personal following...
...With the February arrival of Tyrone Power, Raymond Massey, and Judith Anderson in their "reading" of Stephen Vincent Benet's John Brown's Body, two matters became startlingly clear...
...the other that, for all of Power's devotion to Hollywood and the adoration conferred upon him by the bobby-sox brigade, he can act...
...that from the standpoint of the theater-goer in search of intelligent recreation, it was pleasant, thoroughly diverting, and at times stimulating...
...An admitted trifle, it nevertheless maintains an original point of view, and, with Tom Ewell and Vanessa Brown giving sterling performances, it became an immediate favorite...
...The disappointment he has suffered because even his best friends have failed to realize he meant his play to be one of affirmation is his own fault...
...it beats down the weak, drives man against man, is full of bitterness and decay...
...Offering a program of songs, sketches, monologues, and stories, she became an immediate hit...
...For the justly celebrated invalid is still ailing, and the season in perspective can hardly be described as scintillating...
...musicals and operettas, and, as a kind of leavening to titillate the intellectual lovers of the theater, visits by two outstanding foreign troupes—the Madeleine Re-naud-Jean Louis Barrault Repertory Company from Paris and the Greek National Theater from Athens...
...The play did not tarry long on Broadway, but it did indicate that its creator was someone to be watched...
...A charming bit of foolery about four colonels—American, British, French, and Russian—and how each in his national tradition sets out to woo a sleeping princess representing truth and beauty, it was a great favorite in London...
...A fortnight of errors passed, and then Shirley Booth opened in Arthur Laurents' The Time of the Cuckoo...
...The most controversial play in many seasons is Tennessee Williams' Camino Real...
...His articles have appeared in Esquire, Coronet, Saturday Evening Post, and Reader's Digest There were comedies and tragedies...
...It was the splashy musical...
...In its reincarnation...
...For Maurice Evans, Dial M for Murder is a startling departure...
...John Brown's Body is the story of the Civil War and although its performance was called a "reading" it actually was more than that...
...Although Miss Lillie has support from an hilarious fellow named Reginald Gardiner, the production belongs to her...
...The variegated maladies of the patient remain undiminished: high costs continue their strangulating grip, and the declining reservoir of good playwrights shows no signs of filling...
...Wish You Were Here, by Joshua Logan and Arthur Kober, based on the latter's warm folk play of the Thirties, Having Wonderful Time, with tunes by Harold Rome...
...One was the appearance of Bette Davis in a revue, Two's Company, the other, the revival of Lillian Hellman's The Children's Hour...
...Wish You Were Here had sold out a considerable number of its performances to organizations running theater benefit parties, and, while the public kept coming, Logan worked on revamping the production...
...Miss Booth, playing the role of an American spinster who goes to Venice hoping to encounter romance, scores another of her sensational triumphs...
...On the opening night in Detroit, she fainted in full view of the audience, recovered, and went on with the show...
...Written by Jerome Fields and Jerome Chodorov, with lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green, and boasting an original and tuneful score by Leonard Bernstein, Wonderful Town has every ingredient for success...
...Sitting through this Shavian lark, you are bound to wonder why it has not enjoyed greater esteem...
...The Time of the Cuckoo is a mature piece of work, literate, humorous, and poignant...
...It presents a vast canvas on which Williams splashes his concept of life...
...Yet, granting that the theater year of 1952-53 was not notable for any exciting new literary or musical talent and, at the risk of being summarily suspended from the fashionable Society of Jeremiahs and Cassandras, Inc., I am left with the distinct impression that the year was far from dismal...
...One was that Benet's Pulitzer Prize work is one of the great American epic poems...
...Other theater enthusiasts were content to await the proper celebration of the season's end with the two musicals, Can-Can and Me and Juliet, which were opening too late to be included in this survey...
...As a movie star of stature, her selection of a revue to introduce herself to the theater public was, in itself, something of a sensation...
...The shortest month of the year wound up with additional glory, for it introduced the musical, Wonderful Town, with the eminent movie star, Rosalind Russell, in the principal role...
...Miss Davis helped matters along by doing what press agents dream of...
...October was barely two days old when Beatrice Lillie set things humming in earnest with her arrival in An Evening With Beatrice Lillie...
...What thrilled the overseas audiences was easily understood once the opera opened here, for this is unquestionably the finest production Gershwin's Porgy and Bess has ever received...
...For Miss Russell, Wonderful Town is a complete personal triumph...
...The Millionairess proved to be decidedly minor Shaw, and some of the critics were unimpressed by Miss Hepburn's dynamic energy in the chief role of a voracious woman of wealth...
...At the time, the play, dealing as it does with the child's charge of homosexuality, had the impact of shock...
...This one is a comedy, by far the season's best, dealing with the single misadventure of a husband while his wife has gone off to the country for a vacation...
...Although her voice can be most aptly compared to a gargle, she manages, nevertheless, to handle the tunes assigned to her with aplomb and good nature...
...Bleak House proved too sprawling a, novel for proper editing...
...The run of plays vied for the Worst-Play-Of-The-Season Honors...
...Nothing he has written to date—All My Sons, Death of a Salesman, the adaptation of Ibsen's An Enemy of the People —is based on an appeal to the box-office...
Vol. 17 • June 1953 • No. 6
