The Theater: Old Favorites in Manhattan

With two proved favorites, the 1960-61 season opened glowingly—not on Broadway, but just a step off.

At Manhattan’s City Center, Marcel Marceau was for half the evening the superb solo mime he had proved before; in the second half, introducing his famous Compagnie de Mime, he performed movingly in a “mimodrama” of Gogol’s The Overcoat. This igth century tale of an out-at-elbows clerk who for years toils obsessively to own a fine overcoat only, after an intoxicated moment of triumph, to be robbed of it, is one of literature’s most surcharged parables, often with meanings beyond words. And without words Marceau at times approached those meanings as—against, the stylized puppetry of the other characters—he made something hauntingly human and personal of the clerk. If not everywhere equal, The Overcoat scores as both stage piece and production.

As mime. Marceau is almost as remark able for range as for dexterity; even in a slightly too long evening, there is little sense of repetition. There is great range of emotional and comic effects; of human activity, as with a man engaging in all the attractions of a fair; and of human types, as in catching the whole varied life of a public garden. As a park-bench gossip or seasick voyager, Marceau is hilarious; as high-wire performer, he can be both hilarious and terrifying; as a mask maker pulling masks on and off with lightning speed and ending in agony with a grinning mask that won’t come off, he is incomparable.

Opening the Phoenix Theater’s eighth season, the Tyrone Guthrie production of H.M.S. Pinafore slapped salt freshness into Gilbert and Sullivan. Though bold as always, Director Guthrie in no sense threw out the baby with the bilgewater. He is too lustily stage-minded not to want to limber up the D’Oyly Carte tradition wherever stiff joints masquerade as style; but he is too English and too understanding of G. & S. to want to undermine what they did. The sudden gay way in which he has the crew lift Captain Corcoran off one side of the deck and deposit him on the other admirably indicates the kind of general lift he has given Pinafore.

Despite broader aims, his production never parts with its broad a. Nor is it slick; it is simply more farcical and playful than the usual production, more given to sassy detail in an unmolested design, to whispering what is commonly bellowed or enlarging what is usually small. Just as D’Oyly Carte elegance runs a bit too much to horsehair, Guthrie robustness smacks a bit too much of horseplay. But this Pinafore is Gilbert and Sullivan, not Guthrie and Sullivan. Thus, as Josephine, pretty, pleasing-voiced Marion Studholme sings her arias impeccably for the lovely songs they are; and if Sir Joseph Porter capers, he was always wont to caper, and was always meant to.