New Plays in Manhattan

The Pleasure of His Company (by Samuel Taylor, with Cornelia Otis Skinner) is the first suavely managed drawing-room comedy in several seasons. With Actress Skinner's help, Playwright Taylor--on whose shoulders, more than anyone else's, has fallen the opera cape of the late Philip Barry--has contrived a bright tale of the prodigal father who, turning up for his daughter's wedding, turns everything around him upside down. And Cyril Ritchard, on whose shoulders have fallen both acting the prodigal and directing the play, has added greatly to the gloss.

Actor Ritchard plays an eternal playboy, a gleeful, middle-aged enfant terrible, an international charmer and flirt. When he descends on the correct San Francisco world in which his daughter lives with her mother and stepfather, and his own glamour puts the girl's serious young ranchman fiance in the shade, the wedding bells begin to grow faint. For father's ideal of enjoying every real or sham pleasure goes to daughter's head like champagne. Simultaneously, the blood rushes to the ranchman's, and he denounces father's wastrel charms in ringing tones. After that, the play gets a bit shaky--and talky--what with having to cast its vote for either irreproachable dullness or irresponsible dash. In the end, daughter goes off for a before-the-wedding whirl with her fermented father--presumably as a way of eating her cake and having it, too, or of becoming so well fed with cake as to want only bread and cheese thereafter.

Drawing-room comedies, like drawing-room furniture, tend to be fragile and spindly, and with heavy handling The Pleasure of His Company might easily crash to bits. Happily, the authors have a feeling for tone, and have made the talk--half insulting and half elegant--a nice blend of spit and polish. The Donald Oenslager set is stylish. And with the help of a pleasant cast--Co-Author Skinner, Walter Abel, Charlie Ruggles, Dolores Hart, George Peppard--Cyril Ritchard has carried things farther. Acting papa, he has the grace and precision of a lithe figure skater; directing the play, he keeps things high in the air, like a skillful balloonist.

The Golden Six is Off-Broadway Maxwell Anderson and it is badly off the beam. The contemporary theater's most avid creator of historical drama, Playwright Anderson this time has swooped down on Rome during the last years of Augustus, when the Emperor and his powerful wife Livia (Viveca Lindfors) look forward to a continuing family empire, while most of the family prospects are shown scheming backward to a republic. Proffering history in great swigs and histrionics in huge gobbets, the play staggers and plunges on through a brace of reigns, amid dedicated and degenerate heirs, with Livia's the hidden, misdirecting hand.

Amid outcries about freedom, characters die as if it were the last act of Hamlet; amid tirades against power, slave girls uncover and Caligula runs wild. If there is a unifying note in all this it is that the characters, whether male or female, slave or free, vile or virtuous, slain or spared, are orators one and all. So much oratory has its touches of eloquence, so much theatricalism its flashes of theater. But the play as a whole is lumberingly lurid, and Alvin Epstein's Claudius offers some adroit stammering that is more effective than anyone else's speech.

Once More, With Feeling (by Harry Kurnitz) is a farcical assault on the world of music, not unlike the author's skirmish, in Reclining Figure, with the world of art. The method is to let fly now at chicanery and now at sham, and in between to go in for shenanigans. The central figure is an egomaniac orchestra conductor who, from shattering his musicians' fiddles and his trustees' feelings, can hardly find an orchestra to conduct. On one side he is Blanked by a shameless manager who ten times a day tries to save the day with desperate lies, on the other by a wife who once saved it through charm. Now separated from the maestro, she wants a divorce so she can marry someone else; the litch is that she was not married the first time.

Playwright Kurnitz has a gift for amusing gags, and his play is sprinkled with hem. Here and there, it has a funny situation also; moreover, the manager beyond being show-stealingly played by Walter Matthau--is a juicy character, and not by accident. His rich, lowdown nature is right up Kurnitz' alley, which is Shubert with a touch of Tin Pan. In the world of music, as of art, Playwright Kurnitz remains Broadway to the core, He is not the only recent playwright whose treatment of a stylish professional world, by comparison with The Man Who Came to Dinner, for example, seems raspingly lacking in style. Once More, With Feeling has none of the stealthy purr-and-scratch of music-world wit; rascals are roughnecks, megalomaniacs commit mayhem, bull fiddles see red. There is not a touch of urbane caricature, it is all plebeian cartooning; and even on its own would be broad popular terms, the play has no real Broadway bounce.

George Axelrod's staging is lively, and Arlene Francis is high-spirited as the wife. Joseph Cotten's playing of the conductor is off key, but then the conductor himself seems outlandish.

Make a Million (by Norman Barasch and Carroll Moore) is a type of play that, given time, Broadway might well make a million of itself. The formula is a contraption that keeps a farcical, topical, more or less sexy idea whirling, brings on a character every 46 seconds, drops out a gag every 19, makes a hideaway of the men's room and a rumpus room of the office. Aspiring to pandemonium, the authors never fail of noise; left creatively penniless at the second-act curtain, they spend the third act kiting checks.

In Make a Million, a Southern gal who is $100,000 ahead on a TV quiz show proves to be pregnant by an unknown soldier: to save the show's honor, the girl must be married at once. At once the motor whirs, in dash the characters, and out bounce the gags, off falls the handle. It is pure, dedicated hackwork, with no sign that the authors ever once are writing down. There are two or three good mad situations, a dozen or so funny gags. Topping a helpful cast is Sam Levene, has both a born knack and an acquired skill at low comedy. He cannot come close to saving the show, but he does--a fair part of the time--draw attention away from it.

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