Old Play in Manhattan

A Kiss For Cinderella (by Sir James M. Barrie; produced by Cheryl Crawford & Richard Krakeur). Twenty-five years after Maude Adams chose A Kiss For Cinderella for her last appearance on Broadway, Cinemactress Luise Rainer chose it for her first. Twenty-five years can do even crueler things to a play than to a woman.

Barrie's sentimental fantasy about a half-starved Cinderella of the London slums, who cares for tiny orphans, has gorgeous dreams of a fairy ball and finds a real-life Prince Charming in the person of a London bobby, seems today as offensively cute as a grownup babbling baby talk. It is also blatantly tremulous, with a sustained catch in its throat and a pandering tear in its eye. Worse yet, it is so saccharine that the Scots in Barrie seems to have become butterscots. The play has that most dreadful of all forms of coquetry--a child's.

Fragile and flowerlike, Actress Rainer proved appealing enough at moments, but she was one step ahead of Barrie all the way. She was not just Cinderella, but one of the babes in the wood and one of the orphans of the storm: in Critic John Anderson's phrase, "a career waif."

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