New Plays In Manhattan

Ten Minute Alibi (by Anthony Armstrong; Crosby Gaige & Lee Shubert, producers). London has been excited about this play for the past ten months, and no wonder. Less ghoulish than Rope's End, as cleverly constructed as A. A. Milne's classic thriller The Perfect Alibi, Playwright Armstrong's piece leaps nimbly over all the stenciled pitfalls which ensnare such pedestrian efforts as Keeper of the Keys (see p. 30).

An unprincipled villain named Sevilla (Stiano Braggiotti) is about to lure away to Paris Betty Findon (Daphne Warren Wilson), an impressionable young woman who does not know the horrid fate which awaits her in South America. Her childhood sweetheart, Colin Derwent (Bramwell Fletcher, a capable young Englishman returned to Broadway from Hollywood), can save her only by murdering Sevilla. A barrister, young Derwent has to use all the tricks his quick mind can provide to save himself from the gallows.

First he dreams the perfect murder. But when he puts it into execution he finds circumstances altered. His hand trembles. Sevilla's servant has not been sent away as Derwent had planned, but is waiting in the pantry for his apprehensive master's signal. Worse, the girl, too, is in the house. The results of Derwent's manipulations with a wall clock may puzzle you, but if you think it over a while you will find that Playwright Armstrong has played fair. Cleverest twist to the whole bag of theatrical tricks occurs when Derwent saves himself from detection by impulsively blurting the only truthful statement he makes during the police inquiry.

Let 'em Eat Cake (music & lyrics by George & Ira Gershwin respectively; book by George S. Kaufman & Morrie Ryskind; Sam Harris, producer). When the opening scene of this musicomedy began with the familiar martial strains of "Wintergreen for President," Manhattan first-nighters applauded happily. They recalled what a fine show Of Thee I Sing had been, leaned back in their seats to enjoy its sequel. But when the curtain fell on Let 'em Eat Cake there was an embarrassing dearth of applause. Critics and spectators went out grumbling that the nation's great musicomedy quadrivirate had lain down on their job, had served up a poorly warmed-over dish. If Let 'em Eat Cake was to repeat its predecessor's two-year run, its authors would have to do some fast and effective overhauling.

When Of Thee I Sing was produced, a Presidential election loomed. The show's political jibes were more sharply pointed with every edition of the newspapers. Let 'em Eat Cake concerns itself with a revolution and a dictatorship. Perhaps Messrs. Kaufman & Ryskind could have been more amusing had they chosen to square off at President Roosevelt and the NRA. Instead, their libretto wanders dreamily away into demented unreality.

President Wintergreen (William Gaxton) is on the verge of being defeated for reelection. To no avail do his constituents parade with posters proclaiming: HE KEPT US OUT OF WORK, WINTERGREEN WANTS WINTERGREEN, MRS. WINTERGREEN WANTS WINTERGREEN, WINTERGREEN WANTS MRS. WINTERGREEN. His opponent's adherents advertise: JOHN P. TWEEDLEDEE IS A MOOSE, TWEEDLEDEE IS AN ELK, TWEEDLEDEE IS A HORSE'S NECK.

Wintergreen loses the election, takes his wife (Lois Moran), Vice President Throttlebottom (Victor Moore) and his Cabinet into the shirt business with him in Manhattan. They make blue shirts. Times get worse. An agitator named Kruger, impersonated by that violent Comedian Philip Loeb, gives Wintergreen the notion of starting a Blue Shirt revolution when he leads a band of grimy Union Square radicals ("We Seldom Fill Our Stomics, But We're Full of Economics") in song: Down, down with the House of Morgan! We'll blow up the Roxy organ! Down with novelists like Zola! Down with pianists who play "Nola!". . . We will make all tyrants shiver. Down upon the Sewanee River! Happiness will fill our cup When everything is down that's up! With plenty of blue shirts already on hand, the revolution is not hard to start. In a quavering voice, Alexander Throttlebottom wins the support of the Union League Club by letting the members believe that the revolution is directed against the British. The jokes about France's War debt, the mental incompetence of voters, the uselessness of the Vice-Presidency,* which made Of Thee I Sing so amusing, are all reworked for Let 'em Eat Cake. They fall quite flat. So do George Gershwin's antiphonal choral numbers which have grown longer and more tedious' since he first used them in Strike Up the Band (1927). Brother Ira Gershwin's flair for writing silly repetitive lyrics no longer seems a sprightly burlesque of all lyric-writing. His lyrics often appear to be simply slovenly, lazy work. But Victor Moore is even funnier than he was in Of Thee I Sing. Dictator Wintergreen promises everybody cake when he gets to the Blue House. His successor promises caviar. When the counterrevolution takes place, Funnyman Moore saves himself from being guillotined and becomes President of the U. S. He promises pistachio ice cream.

The Green Bay Tree* (by Mordaunt Shairp; Jed Harris, producer) is an appallingly sharp study of a middle-aged Briton who does not like girls at all and his adopted son who does not like girls much. Ballyhooed as a daring exploration of male homosexuality, done boldly in London last January, it has been purged by Producer-Director Harris of its sexual psychopathy. Now it ostensibly embroiders only the spiritual dependence of an older man on a young man in his own sybaritic image, the boy's sensual dependence on the luxuries the older man supplies. James Dale plays an elderly feline exquisite with a soul of catgut; Laurence Olivier plays a fickle and selfish young toady with an hysteria never seen on the playing fields of Eton.

Plot: to marry the girl he has chosen despite her being a veterinary surgeon, the boy needs the allowance which the older man craftily cuts off. For three months he leaves his benefactor and apparently achieves self-reliance with his fiancee, his real father and the prospect of a job. But at the first overture from the old sybarite, the boy admits to his girl that he has been working merely to pass the time until the old man got too lonely. From the boy's point of view the separation is a coquetry to force the old man into allowing him both bride and allowance. When the coquetry fails, he abjectly abandons fiancee, work and real father. The latter kills his son's "corrupter" and goes to the madhouse instead of the gallows. The boy inherits three houses, a butler and a fortune; his girl abandons him; and he girds himself to duplicate the life of the deceased. For backdrops Designer Robert Edmond Jones has made the author's point with one beautiful sybaritic apartment set and one British middleclass set, perfect with cotton flowers in a glass case, The Last Supper on the wall, 1880 furniture and a parasol top in the fenced fireplace.

As the boy's real father, an evangelist and reformed drunkard, famed O. P. Heggie is remarkably weak. Good scenes: the old sybarite listening to a 15-year-old phonograph record of the choirboy voice of his foster-son; the final scene in which the stage darkens on the young man, new-rich and alone, until only his lighted cigaret is visible and from the wall appears the smiling, luminous death-mask of his dead foster-father.

The Curtain Rises (by B. M. Kaye, produced by Morris Green and Frank McCoy). Until three years ago the cinema had a saccharine young actress named Jean Arthur who was a blond equivalent of Film Actress Mary Brian. After three false starts on Manhattan stages, she steps out now in The Curtain Rises, a thinly entertaining play with an old idea, and gives it warm life and momentary importance. A dowdy socialite girl (Miss Arthur) in love with an actor buys acting lessons from his understudy (Donald Foster) in order ultimately to play one kissing scene with the actor. The lessons make her lovely and self-assured. She falls in love with the understudy who honorably dissembles his own love until the final curtain. In the meantime the girl has triumphantly played the actor-proof kissing part of Juliet opposite the great actor when several people simultaneously fell ill.

Audiences believed in the shabby little story when the quiet, detached tutor began gently to explain to the stiff, prudish, squeaky-voiced spinster the arduous program of becoming an actress. She flinched when he took hold of her to teach her how to breathe properly, how to show a decent interest in her vis-`a-vis. She brightened when she was shown in how many different ways an actor may close a door, depending on what is supposed to be on both sides of it. As the spinster, Miss Arthur is astonishingly unalluring. In her second-act renovation it is not difficult to believe that the tutor should idealize her handsome, sincere blonde face, her modest vitality and her peculiar knack of making her eyes seem to shine. Good scene: the tutor playing a love scene, pushing down the spinster's clenched arms between impassioned lines.

Keeper of the Keys (adapted by Valentine Davies; Sigourney Thayer producer). This vehicle for the late Earl Derr Biggers' famed Detective Charlie Chan largely goes to prove that the wily inspector and his ponderous Chinese proverbs are better off on the screen or between book covers than on the stage. An ex-husband of a leering opera singer assembles her and three of his marital successors in his Lake Tahoe hunting lodge. Actor William Harrigan, a younger, sleeker, slightly more occidental Chan than cinema's Warner Oland, gets a head start when he is added to the party, to find out what happened to a son whom the host believes the singer bore him. The femme fatale is shot almost under the inspector's eyes, but an airplane crash occurring simultaneously outside creates confusion. After more shooting has reduced the suspects from seven to six, Chan lurks omniscently on the set while the guests take turns popping in & out. He pins things at last on the most disarming member of the cast, after a sentimental interlude with another Chinese (recognizable as such by black pajamas, bent knees, croaking falsetto, handscraping). All this is capably strung together but will take the breath of none but rabid Channists.

* For news of the rediscovery of Vice President Garner (see p. 13).

* No connection with Louis Bromfield's novel.

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