The Theater: New Play in Manhattan, Aug. 28, 1950

The Live Wire (by Garson Kanin; produced by Michael Todd) rather suggests to Broadway the arrival of summer than the imminence of fall. If sometimes gay enough for the one, it is never good enough for the other. And it is never good enough—even in intention—for the author of Born Yesterday. So little has Author-Director Kanin been concerned with writing a play that he hasn’t wholly managed to write a show. As in last season’s The Rat Race, he has leaned heavily on vaudeville.

The Live Wire tells of some struggling Broadway actors who have clubbed together and bought a Quonset hut. There they live happily enough, until the actor brother of one of them moves in, raids everything from their wallets to their women and thoroughly poisons their existence. When LIFE does a story on the hut, the live wire lands on the cover, soon exits grandly for Hollywood.

Mr. Kanin’s Leo Mack (nicely played by Scott McKay) kicks up a fair amount of routine commotion, but he is miles behind any of a dozen Ring Lardner heels. In fact the whole setup, only substituting sex for ice hockey, recalls Dan Baxter and the brothers Rover. Sex—with almost willful bad taste—is worked for any laugh it can raise, at any level.

The play has its lively moments—bits of stage business, cracks about show business, short vaudeville turns, Murvyn Vye’s playing of a slimy actor’s agent. But the whole thing seems curiously aimless and trivial, not least because it smacks of the very shoddiness it presumably set out to expose.