New Plays in Manhattan

Night Must Fall (by Emlyn Williams; Sam H. Harris, producer) is a taut, slick study in psychopathic homicide, imported from London after a 55-week run there. In a prologue, a judge denies the appeal of a man convicted of two atrocious murders, whose reenactment then follows. Act I discloses the lonely Essex household of Mrs. Bramson (May Whitty), a querulous, malingering old lady who keeps in genteel British bondage her penniless and emotionally suffocated niece Olivia (Angela Baddeley). When the maid complains of pregnancy and her seducer is called on the carpet, he turns out to be Dan (Author Williams), cocky, ingratiating, cigaret-mouthing bellboy from a nearby hotel in which a woman has been sensationally done to death. Dan cajoles old Mrs. Bramson so skilfully that he be comes her constant attendant. Olivia be comes progressively aware that Dan is the hotel murderer, that the slain woman's head is in his battered hatbox, that he is going to kill her aunt. Olivia is also aware that she is falling in love with him. Climax of her disintegration occurs when she claims the sinister box as her own in order to dissuade a Scotland Yarder from opening it. Every possible dramatic drop is squeezed from the scene in which Mrs. Bramson becomes hysterical with fright at being left alone in the house, hysterical with relief when her adored "Danny" comes back -- to smother her with a cushion.

Author Williams is satisfactorily horrifying as the murderous bellhop, a creepy, insinuating, pinchbeck manic-depressive. Psychological shock-line comes when Danny is about to be led away in handcuffs. Appraising himself in the mirror, he observes: "This is the real thing, my boy!"

Son of a Welsh ironworker, Emlyn Williams, 30, retains a trace of Welsh accent. He spoke no English until he was 8 or 9, went to Oxford at 17 on a scholarship, saw a Somerset Maugham play which dissipated his notions of becoming a schoolteacher. Emlyn Williams has written five successful plays. He has grey-streaked hair, likes unpressed clothes, long, cold drinks and convivial company, haunts courtrooms, reads accounts of murder trials voraciously, claims that the character of Dan in Night Must Fall (first of his plays produced in the U. S.) is a psychological synthesis of five notorious British malefactors.

White Horse Inn (words & music by Hans Muller & Ralph Benatsky; Rowland Stebbins, Warner Bros., Rockefellers, producers) is very large, very colorful, very oldfashioned. A pre-War production afflicted with post-War megalomania, White Horse Inn will doubtless spread its abundant, handsome Tirolese sets out into the audience and up beyond the proscenium arch of John D. Rockefeller's Center Theatre in Radio City for as long a stay as The Great Waltz of 1934-35.

Producer Stebbins (The Green Pastures) and his colleagues have endowed their spectacle, which was performed 651 times in 1931-32 in London, with many a familiar musical show asset. There are three goats, a flock of white pigeons, a pony, a troupe of very gay young children, a troupe of real Tirolese dancers who slap their pants and feet, a tenor with a sad, haughty slant to his eyebrows (Robert Halliday), a comic with a big belly (Billy House), William Gaxton in a some-what humiliating leading role as a love-sick head waiter, Kitty Carlisle as the prima donna and hostess of the White Horse Inn.

Family and tourist trade should guarantee the prosperity of a production of White Horse Inn's size and cleanliness. Sleepy-eyed little Funnyman Jimmie Savo was originally engaged for the part later handed to William Gaxton (Of Thee I Sing), draws $550 a week salary for doing nothing.

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