New Play in Manhattan

A Journey By Night (adapted by Arthur Goodrich; Shuberts, producers), a hackneyed, pathetically pretentious tale of a romantic young man who ruins himself for a scarlet woman, is less notable as an evening's entertainment than as a record-breaker for failure. Once called A Trip to Pressburg and again The Face at the Window, it was written by Leo Perutz and produced by Max Reinhardt in Vienna in 1931 with Mrs. Ferenc Molnar as the leading lady. Three U. S. producers held rights to the show before the Shuberts had Harry Wagstaff Gribble revise it for presentation in Philadelphia in March 1933. The show failed. Next revisionists were Philip Dunning (Broadway) and Harold Johnsrud, whose version opened in Pittsburgh in November 1933 with oldtime Cinemactress Pola Negri as star. The show failed. Next year it was scheduled for another tryout in Boston. It did not come off until the Shuberts got Arthur Goodrich (Richelieu) to do a third adaptation and hired a sad little red-headed woman named Greta Maren for the chief role. Up in Manhattan last week went another chorus of critical boos.

Of this extravagant example of the footling misdirection of U. S. show business, Critic Brooks Atkinson of the Times wrote: "Moral: When a play has defied adaptation for two years, there must be something fundamentally wrong with it."

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