New Play in Manhattan

The Beautiful People (written and produced by William Saroyan). Playwright Saroyan is still selling his big but ancient idea--that living can be pretty fine if people can relax and savor it. The trouble is that in his new play the Theater's most pronounced overdose of vitamin "I" leadens, rather than lightens, his fantasy with the well-known Saroyan whimsey.

The Beautiful People has a boozy, poetical father (Curtis Cooksey) living with an adolescent son and daughter in a decaying mansion on a San Francisco hill. They are supported by a monthly pension check mistakenly addressed tor a dead man. The daughter (Betsy Blair) tends the mice in the house and believes it is they who sometimes spell out her name in flowers on the floor (actually it is just Brother, assisting the family poesy). Brother (Eugene Loring) writes "books"--each consisting of a single pregnant word. One "book" reads "tree." He can also "hear" another vagrant brother in New York playing Paul Whiteman's old waltz, Wonderful One, on the cornet. A shy official arrives, bent on canceling the pension check, but is so beglamored by the fey, bemused life of the household that he arranges to have the payments continued. An old laborer and the parish priest gather round for a drink and contemplation of the universe. Finally the wandering cornetist comes home and plays Wonderful One in the parlor. His father exclaims: "Polestar and pyramid, boy--play it again!" As the boy plays it again, the curtain falls.

Almost anyone of sensibility is a pushover for old waltz songs on the cornet, and Saroyan is a master of many similar nostalgias. Their potency keeps The Beautiful People from being merely the old charmy game, played by an expert. For, notwithstanding its whimsical deadweight, the inventive, germinal quality in Saroyan is one of the most fertile forces in the U.S. Theater.

Last week, after two and a half years and 1,122 performances, Ole Olsen & Chic Johnson abandoned the poultry, ice cakes, blank cartridges and other bughouse furnishings of Broadway's Hellzapoppin, turned over their parts to Jay C. Flippen and "Happy" Felton. Reason: Olsen & Johnson were off to Hollywood to make a Hellzapoppin movie.

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