Harts & Flowers
After a late and humdrum start, the new season at last unrolled its red carpet and put on a white tie last week. On three successive nights celebrities and sophisticates flocked to welcome their favorite comedy-writing team, their favorite musicomedy-writing team, one of their two favorite actresses.
In The Man Who Came to Dinner (produced by Sam H. Harris), George S. Kaufman & Moss Hart had a smash hit on their hands. Tale of a famous lecturer who goes to a dull dinner-party in an Ohio town, gets hurt, and has to stay on in the house for weeks, the play's wit is as gleamingly cutthroat as its antics are gorgeously custard-pie. The identity of the lecturer is as open a secret as the fact that George Eliot was a woman. Lecturer Sheridan Whiteside (Monty Woolley) is an unexpurgated version of Alexander Woollcott, who has been a friend of the authors' as long as he has been a legend of the literary world. They originally created Sheridan Whiteside as a part for Woollcott. He refused to play it because he had to lecture in real life, but he will probably do so this winter on the road.
In Whiteside, Kaufman & Hart hilariously held the mirror up to ill-nature. Crusty, crotchety, mischiefmaking, selfish, their renowned invalid badgers all comers in epigrammatic Billingsgate. Every combat, to him, is a Blitzkrieg. Now & then, as on Christmas Eve, his gushing soul drips treacle; but the real Whiteside, from his wheelchair throne, commandeers the house, forbids his hosts to use the telephone, tries to smash his secretary's love affair, bewitches the servants, bedevils his nurse. Snaps he to "Miss Bedpan": "My great-aunt Jennifer . . . lived to be 102 and when she was three days dead she looked better than you do now." But the last word is hers: "If Florence Nightingale had nursed you, she would have married Jack the Ripper instead of founding the Red Cross."
The play is rich in more than one kind of name-calling. Before the wheelchair genuflect the world's great. "Gertrude Stein" phones from Paris. "Admiral Byrd" sends penguins, "William Beebe" an octopus. "Harpo Marx" arrives for a cyclonic visit. "Noel Coward" whizzes by, stopping long enough to play a "new song" of his, a howling burlesque all about
. . . the cosmic Ritz
shattered
and scattered
to bits.
Though no stage character but Whiteside has ever made a wheelchair seem so much like a guillotine, Kaufman & Hart have filled their flabbergasted Ohio living-room with more than verbal slaughter, have turned it also into an immensely comic beer garden. While wisecracks pour out of one faucet, nonsense pours out of another. As a comedy of bad manners, The Man Who Came to Dinner turns crude now & then. But with Actor Woolley excellent in the fattest of parts, with most of the jokes buttered on both sides, and with everything from convicts to cockroaches to brighten up the cast, the show is comedy in the best style--all Woollcott and a yard wide.
Queried by TIME for his opinion of Whiteside, ex-Dramatic Critic Woollcott answered: "I only review plays for money." In Too Many Girls (produced by George Abbott) Richard Rodgers & Lorenz Hart, who always bob up with something as little like their last musicomedy as possible, have jumped all the way from Shakespeare and old Syracuse to college and New Mexico. Their scene is a rundown campus called Pottawatomie ("One of those colleges that play football on Fridays") and their plot a combination of Boy Meets Girl and Team Beats Rival.
Half the time kidding rah rah stuff, during the other half Rodgers & Hart rove as far from the campus as they please. In Spic & Spanish, dark, Puerto Rican St. Vitus Dancer Diosa Costello does everything but break a leg. In I Didn't Know What Time It Was, charming Marcy Wescott tremulously chalks one up for love. In Give It Back to the Indians, Rodgers & Hart sell short the Manhattan they raised a glass to in the Garrick Gaieties. In I Like to Recognize the Tune* Rodgers & Hart--who hate swing--give "hot" bands an earful:
A guy called Krupa plays the drums like thunder;
But the melody is six feet under; hand "sweet" bands a lollipop:
When she hears those chords of Eddy Duchin's
Elsa Maxwell starts quivering with her two chins.
Good as it is, the music is not Rodgers at quite his best or most individual. But where Rodgers has dropped the reins, Producer Abbott has seized them and gone to town like Yankee Doodle. He has given Too Many Girls the genuine youthfulness of such Abbott comedies as Brother Rat and What a Life, and for the same reason: because it is full of natural, exuberant young people. He has given it a headlong pace, a slam-bang zest and zip. Too Many Girls is in no one respect outstanding, but it doesn't need to be: it is simply one of those right-as-rain shows that don't stall at the start, break down in the middle, or run out of gas before the end.
Ladies and Gentlemen (produced by Gilbert Miller; by Ben Hecht & Charles MacArthur from a play by Ladislaus Bush-Fekete) brings Near-Divinity Helen Hayes back to Broadway in her first new role there since December 1935. For this Broadway can rejoice, even though finding anything to rejoice at in the play itself is like looking for a needle in a Hayestack. After a two-month tryout, this thing of shreds & patches is still, like Gaul, divided into three parts--comedy, drama, romance --and, as in Gaul, the three parts are on very uncivil terms.
Story of a girl who sways a murder-trial jury (TIME, July 24), Ladies and Gentlemen is least feeble during its comedy scenes, when it tweaks the noses of various goofy jurors. As for its love scenes, two people in love may use baby talk, speak in code, communicate through music, or say nothing at all; but (even when on jury duty) they do not talk, as in Ladies and Gentlemen, on stilts.
*