New Plays in Manhattan

Crazy Quilt is the sequel to Sweet & Low, presented earlier this season by famed Fannie Brice and her husband Billy Rose (TIME, Dec. 1). It is a great deal sweeter and not so low as its predecessor. Supporting Miss Brice in the fun-making are Phil Baker and his accordion, Ted Healy and his grotesque ''stooges" (comic assistants). There are also: Fannie's nimble-footed brother Lew, the excellent ballroom dancers Gomez & Winona, a pretty little girl named Ethel Norris who sings and dances, good music by Harry Warren. For once, a Jewish production has acquired the smart, light touch.

Miss Brice does her celebrated Jewish interpretation of Peter Pan ("It ish Dink-a-Bell!"). She is again very funny as the slightly Semitic Southern girl in her travesty on Strictly Dishonorable, but not so funny in a maudlin recitation of Dorothy Parker's Telephone Call. Mr. Baker trades gags with his fat friend in a box, sings an ingratiating song called "Under The Clock At The Astor," indicating with his stick "females and he-males and she-males, and girls who bear loneliness well." Attention is called to the best of Crazy Quilt's songs, "In the Merry Month of Maybe," in which Ira Gershwin and Mr. Rose have taken the utmost advantage of lyricist's license:

We'll not go to Paris or Sahara. We should care.

Rockaway's the Riviera,

If you're there.

A Modern Virgin relates the story of a spoiled, candy-eating, dirty-book-reading girl of 16 whose fiance is in "the prime of life," that is to say, too old for her. As only he can, Playwright Elmer Blaney Harris (Young Sinners), who sets great store by his heroine's virginity, strives to make it appear that she is just a curious, impetuous, innocent little soul who needs freedom, not the repression of her dour aunt's household. For two acts the virgin is enamored of a wayward novelist. Her fiance had hoped that the novelist would shock and all but seduce the little girl, scare her into his secure arms. There are a few hitches to the scheme, but the plan ultimately works. Mr. Harris' unwholesome moral seems to be that it really made no difference with whom his heroine mated, so long as she was bedded. Spectators who are revolted by the "morning after" scene which follows the hasty nuptials and terminates the play, can only wonder, as Funnyman Robert Charles Benchley once did: "Don't children ever play games any more?"

Cast as the heroine of Playwright Harris' coy flirtation with the Facts of Life is blond Margaret Sullavan, an authentic theatrical find. Her previous experience was with Princeton's McCarter Theatre and as understudy to the leading lady in a road company of Strictly Dishonorable. She has a mild Southern accent which she keeps from becoming unpleasant, does her best to be charming and ingenuous in her messy role. The novelist is played by Roger Pryor (Up Pops the Devil). He also lets fresh air into the play, prevents it from getting too blue around the edges.

Old Man Murphy. Patriarch Patrick Murphy heard that his son in America was running for mayor of his town. Mr. Murphy had done a good deal of campaigning himself, had once shaken the hand of the great Parnell, so he sent a letter to his son "marked Impahrtent on one side and Errgent on the other" and left the old sod to electioneer for his offspring. His son's wife was not happy to welcome the old man. She had social aspirations, had changed the family name to Murfree when they moved out of the Patch.

When Mr. Murphy (Arthur Sinclair of Mr. Gilhooley) arrives in the U. S. things begin humming. He embarrasses his daughter-in-law by attacking the English butler with a shoe, consorts with the shanty Irish in the Patch. He is delighted to attend a bountiful wake where "they were carrying the food away in bags, whiskey flowed like water and everybody was praying like the Twelve Apostles." Mr. Murphy, whose voice another character describes as sounding "like His Holiness himself over the radio," succeeds in rounding up the Irish vote for his son, straightening out the affairs of his Americanized descendants, getting his pretty granddaughter married to a boy of good Hibernian stock.

Arthur Sinclair should get a great deal of fun out of the part of spry Old Man Murphy, shouting insults at other actors in a rich brogue, taking his coat half off to fight imaginary enemies, leaping on chairs to deliver political orations. His gross cartoon of an aged playboy of the western world comes off admirably, although the walls of Dublin's hallowed Abbey Theatre, where Mr. Sinclair used to perform mystic Synge dramas and nationalistic plays with the Irish Players, probably trembled when he accepted this role in rough-&-tumble farce.

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