New Plays in Manhattan

You Can't Take It With You (by Moss Hart & George S. Kaufman; Sam H. Harris, producer) demonstrates that a pair of showmen who feel as much at home in the theatre as they do in bed can confect a magnificently funny show without bothering much about the plot. The plot of You Can't Take It With You is deliberately banal. Two young lovers are nearly parted because of their families, a dramatic situation which has not grown any younger since Pyramus & Thisbe. So theatrically threadbare is this narrative scheme that it takes an ignited dish of red fire to bring down the first act curtain, an off-stage explosion to close Act II. These punctuations are, however, not really necessary for in creating Grandpa Vanderhof (Henry Travers) and his clan --the Girl's family which the Boy's family views with alarm--the playwrights have conjured a species of dramatis personae which transcends plot, bursts the bonds of the established theatre and mounts into the stratosphere of great literary lunacy.

One morning 35 years before the curtain rises on You Can't Take It With You, Grandpa Martin Vanderhof arrived at his office building, rode upstairs on the elevator and rode down again. Grandpa had had enough. Thenceforth, he devoted his entire attention to witnessing commencements, visiting zoos, raising snakes, collecting stamps and taking it easy. He encouraged his household to do likewise, with the result that his son-in-law Sycamore took up Meccano and manufacturing fireworks, his daughter (Josephine Hull) turned to painting, then to playwriting when someone left a typewriter at the house by mistake. Grandpa's free-&-easy home was also opened to a pair of happy-go-lucky colored folk, the iceman--a Mr. De Pinna--and the milkman, who had no name of his own so Grandpa buried him under his when he died. Grandpa was never bothered with mail after that.

Having grown up while all this was happening, Granddaughter Essie Sycamore has easily adjusted herself to a home which is usually either ringing with badly played musical instruments or trembling with pyrotechnical explosions. Essie marries a xylophone player who comes around one day. She also devotes much of her time to the commercial manufacture of "Love Dreams," a candy, and the study of toe dancing. She and the rest of the irresponsible, carefree household are happy as a jaybird with a worm until suddenly Granddaughter Alice Sycamore (Margot Stevenson) becomes painfully aware of the family's prodigious eccentricity because she and her highly conventional employer's son, Tony Kirby, fall in love.

To Alice's dismay, a dinner party by her family for her boy friend's is interrupted first by an actress with the heebie-jeebies, then by a Russian who wants to wrestle, lastly by a party of raiders from the Federal Bureau of Investigation. A night in jail, however, softens up the haughty Kirbys. By the following evening the course of true love is smoothed and Grandpa is able to gather his family and friends and in-laws-to-be about his dinner table, amiably ask his customary benediction:

"Well, Sir, here we are again. . . . About all we need is our health. The rest we leave up to you."

Brother Rat (by John Monks Jr. & Fred Finklehoff; George Abbott, producer) is not a contemptuous salutation between inmates of Sing Sing prison but, according to Messrs. Monks & Finklehoff, a fraternal greeting customarily exchanged by cadets of Virginia Military Institute. The authors of Brother Rat should not be mistaken about this since they were graduated from V. M. I. no longer ago than 1932. Up to the time their play was presented, Broadway had been given to understand from two previous offerings of the season, So Proudly We Hail and Bright Honor, that a U. S. military school combines all the unpleasant characteristics of a psychopathic ward and a convict ship. Brother Rat will alter this impression, for able George Abbott's first production of the season is an ingenuous farce which is never as screamingly funny as his Boy Meets Girl, but which brims with nice young people and gentle laughter.

V. M. I. prides itself on the military records of its graduates in every war since 1839. But if the Institute's output of future soldiers is to be judged by Billy Randolph (Frank Albertson), the nation is not quite so safe as it was. It is Billy who persuades his roommates to sneak out after taps, to pawn Government property, to make unwise wagers on the big baseball game and to place the trio within an ace of dismissal in disgrace. To their credit the students never permit these difficulties to interfere with games, good-natured hazing and some of the most authentic and wholehearted necking seen on Broadway for years.

Black Rhythm (words & music by Donald Heywood; Earl Dancer & J. H. Levey, producers) was looked forward to as the season's first & only colored musicomedy on Broadway. It will be looked back upon as having had the season's most remarkable first night.

Much had been expected of succulent, dusky Jeni LeGon, who headed a cast largely recruited from Harlem nightclubs. Unfortunately, just as Miss LeGon began to waggle, noxious fumes began to spread through the orchestra. When spectators began to depart, the Negro house manager scurried down the orchestra aisle, located a stench bomb, hopefully sprayed the spot with some sort of perfume. The ffft! ffft! ffft! of his spray gun so distracted the actors that they began to miss their lines. Nevertheless, they carried on valiantly until the last first-nighter had departed.

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