Report from the Road

"Trying to anticipate any theater season," said a critic, "is like wiping off the lipstick before you've kissed the girl." Last week the girl was getting ready to be kissed. Trying out on the road before the hoped-for move to Broadway, new shows were primping frantically amid the desperate attentions of play doctors, angels, producers and producers' wives.

Goldilocks, a musical visit to the Cro-Magnon days of moviemaking, was singing just a bit off key in Philadelphia, and its authors, Critic Walter Kerr and his wife Jean (Please Don't Eat the Daisies), were working overtime to tune it up. At the Grand, the musical version of Vicki Baum's Grand Hotel that is scheduled to take Paul Muni back to his beginnings as a vaudeville hoofer, is laid up in California while its producers try to produce a new book. Other shows were more nearly ready to kiss the road goodbye:

P: HOWIE, by Phoebe Ephron, moved from Boston to Broadway riding an unplanned gale of publicity: the quiz show scandals. Howie (Albert Salmi) is a hulking ex-deck ape, the kind of guy who knows everything except when to shut up. He finishes his mother-in-law's Double-Crostic, his father-in-law's sentences and the neighbors' bridge bids--in short, the perfect quiz contestant. But when his sister-in-law (Patricia Bosworth) helps con him into going on a quiz show, he refuses $96,000 after he discovers that his opponent has got a fast shuffle. All this drew exactly 262 laughs one evening in Boston. Until curtain time in New York this week, where Howie opens the season, all hands were working on a new third act.

P: A TOUCH OF THE POET is the only extant play (the author tore up the others) of that final series in which Eugene O'Neill meant to spell out the dark, brooding mysteries of the human tragedy.

Britain's Eric Portman is excellent as Cornelius Melody, a vainglorious Irishman who has quit the auld sod, risen to glory in Wellington's armies, been cashiered and is now living out his disgrace as a shabby saloon keep in the Boston of the 1820's. Helen Hayes survives her own saccharine whimsy as the harassed biddy married to a ruined cavalier, and Kim Stanley is impressive in the role of the old man's pride-ridden daughter. New Haven critics and audiences were divided, but "Con" Melody's brogue should still make one of the richest voices on Broadway.

P:THE WORLD OF SUZIE WONG, an adaptation of Richard Mason's bestselling novel, flounced into Boston dressed in Designer Jo Mielziner's spectacular sets --a revolving stage with great, gaudy panels that slide in and out, up and down, through dancing and disaster, life and death. The story line is distressing: boy meets Hong Kong "Yum-Yum girl," boy loves girl, girl loves boy, boy rejects girl, boy returns to girl (Yum Yum!) but cannot support her baby, girl walks out because she loves baby better, baby is killed in earthquake, boy helps pay for funeral. It is lovely, almond-eyed France Nuyen (the Liat of the movie version of South Pacific) who goes farthest toward saving the show with her high-heeled stance, her eloquent hips and her intelligent impersonation of a tough but dreamy little tramp. Director Josh Logan is unworried. After opening night he was overheard saying: "This is the kind of play that even the people who talk against it will make people want to see it. They'll say, 'It's a lousy story of a damn whorehouse.' What difference does it make if they say it has a lousy second act?"

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