New Play on Broadway

Come Blow Your Horn (by Neil Simon) seems the best of the season's many bad farce comedies. It must be grouped with the bad ones because it writes most of its scenes in duplicate, smudging some of them to boot; makes most of its jokes in triplicate, and should never make half of them at all; and seems to confuse the typewriter bell with a cash register's. But Come Blow Your Horn does squat head and shoulders above a number of recumbent rivals: beyond a lively production, it manages to keep going; it has some fresh and funny lines and some diverting scenes and characters.

The play tells,of a successful, school-of-hard-knocks Jewish manufacturer whose older son (Hal March) has turned playboy and whose younger son leaves home for his brother's bachelor apartment and way of life. Come Blow Your Horn alternates--and often combines--wolf calls with phone calls; it offers Pop's indignant sermons, sarcasms and ultimatums, Mom's discombobulated personality and absorption with food. Lou Jacobi can be humanly amusing as Pop, Warren Berlinger cornily amusing as little brother suddenly outdoing big one. But the play's three acts are like having much the same thing for breakfast, lunch and dinner; and there is one of those final 30 seconds in which Playboy embraces both work and wedlock and Pop embraces Playboy. Playwright Simon will be more worth thinking about when he spurns a last-minute eraser and uses a blue pencil throughout.

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