Up From Avery

In Chicago for the past month a model T laugh-getter has been burning up the road at a $17,000-a-week clip, leaving such streamlined models as Blithe Spirit and Angel Street to choke on its dust. Called Good Night Ladies, the show is the late Avery Hopwood's 22-year-old, towel-draped Ladies Night in a Turkish Bath, with hardly a line left that Hopwood would recognize, but with the situations all they were and then some.

The then-some includes the shapeliest girls, the scantiest clothes available. These, together with plenty of steam-room antics and off-color dialogue, turn Hopwood's tale of a professor (Buddy Ebsen) who is completely unnerved at the sight of exposed female flesh into the likes of a burlesque show. Good Night Ladies, as Chicago Tribune Critic Cecil Smith put it, satisfied "every taste except good taste."

The show was the hunch of short, stocky Al Rosen, a Hollywood agent who thought the public needed a good old bedroom farce, and dug through dozens of them till he found the one he liked. He hired Playwright Cyrus Wood (Sally, Irene and Mary, Street Singer) to doctor it up, finally found an angel. The show opened in Santa Barbara in February and so outraged that staid community that the city council met. Good Night Ladies thereupon scrammed to San Francisco for a week, clicked, stayed five. When it lit out for Chicago it had already earned back its $6,000 nut, has netted a weekly $6,000 to $7,000 ever since. Rosen thinks it will run a year there. He is not even thinking about Broadway yet.

Broadway, meanwhile, is hastily thumbing over some of Avery Hopwood's other dead tropical fruit--Fair and Warmer, The Gold Diggers, Getting Gertie's Garter, The Demi-Virgin.

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