The Theater: Rodger and Hammerstein’s Pipe Dream

Pipe Dream (music by Richard Rodgers; book and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II). Always anxious not to repeat themselves, Rodgers & Hammerstein have turned in Pipe Dream to the flophouse and bordello set of John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row. When not cavorting, the bims and bums heave and push at a constantly stalled romance between a popular young scientist and a pretty waif befriended by a madam. To get Doc a microscope, Cannery Row stages a raffle and fancy-dress brawl, and when the lovelorn heroine takes up despairing residence inside a boiler, they have at the lovelorn hero to fetch her out.

Except for nice music. Pipe Dream is pretty much of a bust. It is so warm-hearted about a cold world, so high-minded about its lowlifes as to emerge mere hootch-coated butterscotch. Its bawdyhouse seems about as sinful as Saturday night in a Y.W.C.A.; when its mugs and molls carouse, what is meant to be lowdown seems more like a hoedown. And it is not just the madam who has a heart of gold; with all of its characters’ hearts, Pipe Dream shows a positive Midas touch.

Seldom truly raffish, the show is often just plain dull. There are some attractive Hammerstein lyrics, and the Rodgers score ranges pleasantly from the lilt of A Lopsided Bus to the schmalz of All at Once You Love Her. But the production adds little gloss: the dancing is uninspired, the performing—except for William Johnson as Doc—unimpressive. TV’s Judy Tyler is little more than a pretty ingenue, and as the madam, Opera Singer Helen Traubel is wildly though likably miscast.

Hamlet in Moscow

No theatrical troupe can ever be completely sure of how it will be received in a strange town—particularly when the troupe is English and the town is Moscow. Last week, for the first time since the 1917 revolution, an English theatrical company was playing in the Soviet capital. It had come to town with an old Russian favorite: Shakespeare’s Hamlet (which was presented in the Russian theater of the 1930s as a story of the triumph of a young revolutionary). The Hamlet was a new production (in English) that had not even been proved in London, boasted but a single starkly simple set, and offered a talented but young (33) and relatively untried Hamlet, Paul Scofield.

For its Moscow run of twelve performances, the English company was moved into the Moscow Art Theater, where it occupied famed Director-Theorist Stanislavsky’s own playhouse, an austere place that looks less like a theater than a lecture hall. All seats for all performances were sold out days in advance, and on opening night crowds of Muscovites besieged the theater and tied up traffic for hours as they watched 1,200 diplomats, officials and theater personalities, not a single one in evening dress, converge on the spectacle. Though theater lovers offered four times the box-office price for first-night tickets, there were no sellers.

First-nighters were not disappointed. They saw a fast-moving, 3-hr.-20 min. Hamlet. When the house lights went on at the end of the play, the entire audience rose to its feet and surged down toward the stage. An immense (6 ft. tall) bouquet was sent up to the actors, who took 16 curtain calls, during the last three of which the audience chanted Scofield’s name in unison. After the applause had been going on for so long that the actors felt the need to introduce some variety, they applauded the audience for their reception. Said Actor Alec Clunes, who played the king: “All through the performance the audience was very much with us. We didn’t get as many laughs as we would expect to get in London, but we got many. And I suspect we got a lot of tears.”

Unlike the audience. Pravda’s Critic Boris Zakhava did not allow himself to be swept away. But he did call the direction “bold and bright,” and Scofield’s Hamlet “clean and honest.” Editorially, Pravda called the audience enthusiasm “a demonstration of the friendly feelings of the Soviet people for the English people.” The demonstration was carried on nightly at the stage door after the show in a form familiar to the West: hordes of teen-age girls descended on Scofield and mobbed him for autographs.