Old Play in Manhattan

Hotel Paradiso, written 71 years ago by the once-famous and prolific Georges Feydeau with the collaboration of Maurice Desvallieres, is exceedingly standard and exceedingly French French farce. This means sex first, but not in the long run foremost. In such goings-on, slapstick and speed become a good deal more important than spice. The bed is only a prop; the actual objective is bedlam.

In Hotel Paradiso Bert Lahr is married to a battle-ax, and somehow gets out from under her thumb to seek sin with a beautiful blonde lady. In due course, for one reason or another, he and the lady, her husband's nephew and a lady's maid, the husband himself, and a family friend with four innocent golden-haired daughters, are all cheek-by-jowl or better in a Paris fleabag. Upstairs and down they scamper, in and out of rooms they dash, till the gendarmes come rushing in at the second-act curtain.

As entertainment, Hotel Paradiso is a bit in-and-out itself. The show has lively spurts and is attractively dotted with mad scenes. Osbert Lancaster's expertly ghastly sets are part of the fun, and the play's various set-tos are here and there funny. The whole evening is a brightly instructive exhibit of the mechanics of French farce; it is never quite an occasion of full-bodied merriment.

Under Peter Glenville's direction, the acting is not all of a piece, but Angela Lansbury as the blonde and Vera Pearce as the battle-ax catch perfectly the right emphatic, externalized manner. Bert Lahr's performance is harder to appraise: he is in a sense too good for French farce without always being entirely right for it. His clowning has always a certain human appeal; his zany genius is rooted in character and a little disrupted by plot. His own timing is flawless, but too personal for pacing flat, stylized farce. He doubtless gives the play something extra. But if Hotel Paradiso lacks the sustained period-farce verve of last season's The Matchmaker, it may partly be because Lahr is not Ruth Gordon's equal as a center tent-pole, either in the sturdiness with which she held whole situations upright, or in the barbaric magnificence with which she could topple them over.

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