New Play in Manhattan

The Great Sebastians (by Howard Lindsay and Russel Grouse) are a pair of ham vaudevillians with a wobbly mind-reading act. They also find themselves in a wobbly situation, performing publicly in Communist Prague the day Jan Masaryk dies, and snappishly ordered to perform privately. But perhaps it should first be said that the Sebastians are played, in gay holiday style, by the Lunts. Otherwise, their being ordered by a Communist general to read the minds of his supper guests and their getting nastily involved in political intrigue might create an impression of something grim and arouse hopes of something gripping. As it is, The Great Sebastians is not the least bit grim or gripping--only, now and then, rather ploddingly serious. In itself, in fact, Lindsay & Grouse's "melodramatic comedy" is chiefly a sequence of well-planned opportunities for the Lunts to display their past mastership at all the bright surfacy wrinkles of their profession. If, in time, a blindfolded Lynn Fontanne can identify certain members of the audience, almost any blindfolded member of the audience could identify Actress Fontanne from a single coo. In The Great Sebastians, however, the Lunts' cooing counts for less than their billing: the show is liveliest when it is making fun of show folk, and the Lunts are most delightful when they are capering as hams. The plot also permits them their moments of deft heroics, and some nice dressing-room nonsense as well as drawing-room aplomb.

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