Todd's in His Heaven

It was less a Broadway opening than a kind of $5.50 question. On its road tryout Gypsy Rose Lee's maiden effort at playwriting, THE NAKED GENIUS, had become the script-tease of the season. Two days after it went into rehearsal, it was sold to 20th Century-Fox on a sliding-scale basis for a maximum $365,000. In Boston, Baltimore, Pittsburgh, it packed them in--but kept stalling off its Broadway opening. Then Producer Michael Todd (Star & Garter, Something for the Boys) boldly announced he would open the show there over the violent protests of Gypsy and Director George S. Kaufman, who wanted it buried. As a final flip of the G-string, Todd took advance ads in Manhattan papers reading: "Guaranteed not to win the Pulitzer Prize."

There is no doubt whatever about the justice of this comment. The play is frightful. Though concerned with the private life of a stripteaser, Playwright Lee has snubbed her recollections, which might have been gay and rackety, to indulge her imagination, which is chaotic, and display her wit, which is calamitous. Her Honey Bee Carroll (Joan Blondell) inhabits an insane world of trained dogs, live monkeys, mauve milliners, thieving ladies'-room attendants--a world that Gypsy never makes funny and somehow manages to make sexless.

The critics caned the show unmercifully. But the public, its pockets bulging, is paying scant attention to the critics this season; and to swarms of visiting servicemen and welders, Gypsy Rose Lee is a dazzling name. The second night--reported Columnist Leonard Lyons--Director Kaufman phoned to learn the worst. Todd chuckled: "We had 14 standees." Snapped Kaufman: "Say that slowly. I know you must be hysterical." Said Todd slowly: "Fourteen standees." "Send me the statement, verified," barked Kaufman. "And if what you say is true, then I'll quit show business."

Cheered by the success of The Naked Genius, three other frights wobbled hopefully to Broadway last week. SLIGHTLY MARRIED (by Aleen Leslie) was the fourth obstetrical farce in recent months, let out one frightened postnatal wail, expired. VICTORY BELLES (by Alice Gerstenberg), a free-for-all about the husband shortage, was likely to remain unchallenged as the worst show of the season. MANHATTAN NOCTURNE (by Roy Walling) told how a down-in-the-mouth writer (Eddie Dowling) and a poor little call girl gave each other the faith to begin afresh. A trite story tritely told, it had moments of theater, might possibly--in this most uncritical of seasons--squeak through.

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