New Plays in Manhattan

Auntie Mame (adapted from Patrick Dennis'-novel by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee) will likely be the favorite popular comedy of the season. It matters little that, far from being a sound play, Auntie Mame is really no play at all. For it will go fast and far on the inherent appeal of its chief character and the tremendous vivacity and skill of the gal who plays her. Everybody enjoys a lovable lunatic, and Rosalind Russell is a delight as the kindhearted madwoman of Beekman Place, bringing up her small nephew in a world of sidecars for breakfast, living herself in sumptuous dishabille, now marrying, now dispensing with marriage, now rescuing her nephew from a stuffy brand of it.

Turning a sophisticated comic strip of a novel into an even broader but somewhat less vulgar play, the adapters--with wonderful help from Designer Oliver Smith--have hit on a kind of scene-a-minute technique. Their slapdash method, though highly uncreative, is not entirely illadvised. Thanks to Morton DaCosta's lively staging, it makes speed a kind of substitute for wit, and puts pedestrian writing on horseback. Its quick-changes also consort well with Auntie Mame's scatterbrained nature, besides providing a fine succession of new costumes, new hairdos, new wall treatments, new gaffes, new predicaments and new men.

Whatever her predicament or hairdo, Actress Russell remains the triumphant embodiment of festive pandemonium and soignee wackiness. Hers is a delightful twining of farceuse and comedienne: she can give a drawing-room inflection to a loony-bin situation, or turn daffy or profane in the midst of playing a grande dame. To wonderful good nature she adds a few drops of acidity--juice from a sun-kissed lemon. Though Auntie Mame is really a one-woman show, Peggy Cass deserves mention as an unmarried expectant mother, and Polly Rowles as a stage star who has always started sleeping it off when the party has scarcely begun.

The Sleeping Prince (by Terence Rattigan) turns on his side now and then, and mumbles and stirs, but never once wakes up. Having given Broadway--in Separate Tables--the season's liveliest theater to date, Playwright Rattigan here blindly scattereth poppy while contriving poppycock. His scene is the Carpathian legation in London at the time of George V's coronation. His "occasional fairy tale" concerns a fetching young American chorus girl whom a Grand Duke invites for supper, and the night. But after a night rendered blameless by too much vodka, she stays on to meet and beguile the family, to go with the young King to a ball, with the Grand Duke's wife to the Abbey, and at length with the Grand Duke into the next room.

Plainly Carpathia should border on Ruritania, but it has none of its dashing absurdity or charm. In terms of setting, costumes, orders, ribands, monocles and curtsies, The Sleeping Prince is almost cinematically royal, and about as frivolous and frothy as an Iron Cross. The lovers seem wildly mismated, though perhaps they are only miscast. Michael Redgrave works hard and skillfully at a smug and arrogant Grand Duke who needs humanizing, but can find no way to make the part pay off and though Barbara Bel Geddes is a young dream in white satin, she also seems inviolably ingenue, who would scarcely sin with a Fairy Prince and never in the world with a charmless Grand Duke.

Actress Bel Geddes has some likable moments just being herself, and Cathleen Nesbitt gets an air of elegance into the part of the Grand Duchess and a bit of fun out of it. But in general it seems no accident that Their Carpathian Highnesses should be left severely to themselves amid all the coronation whirl and glitter, and that even a mousy lady in waiting should beg off attendance on the plea of a cold.

* A pen name for Edward Everett Tanner III, a onetime Manhattan promotion man (TIME, Sept. 17).

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