The Theater: New Play on Broadway, Nov. 14, 1960

Invitation to a March (by Arthur Laurents) takes place, on the eve of a summer wedding, outside two Long Island beach houses. In one house are the young bride and her middle-class mother, with the groom and his rich parents as house guests. In the other house lives a woman who many summers before, had a passionate affair with the groom’s father, and with her lives the fruit of that affair, her proudly loyal son. This son now meets the unawakened bride, and love flares up; the father meets the woman again, and love has its past-tense ardors; and at length the woman meets the bride’s snobbish, small-minded mother and the groom’s sophisticated one, in what is meant to be the last round in a bout between the free spirit and conformity.

Conformity v. Individualism, however seems much less a theme than a mere gimmick, exactly as picturing the bride as the Sleeping Beauty seems facile fancy rather than vital symbolism. Whatever the play may thematically profess, much of it theatrically is just old Wilde in new bottles: the triangle, in A Woman of No Importance, of the rich peer, the unwed mother and their son. Laurents’ play substitutes beach-house manners for country-house ones; it speaks a livelier lingo in a much less melodramatic voice, and its Mrs. Grundy sports a Southern accent. But even Laurents’ “The weak shall inherit the earth” echoes A Woman’s famous “The worst form of tyranny the world has ever known. The tyranny of the weak over the strong.” And where Wilde was almost the last user of the classic aside, Laurents has adopted its chic, flip descendant, the crack or comment flung straight at the audience.

Invitation to a March is clever and sassy enough in places—the respectable mothers have sharp claws and sometimes sharp tongues, and the best of the asides are amusing. But beneath the cleverness there lurks no substance whatever, while mixed in with it is something distastefully meretricious. Much more than it is frank or funny about sex, the play seems merely lip smacking. Eileen Heckart is properly brittle as the groom’s mother, and as the unmarried one, Celeste Holm, when not forced to “be a noble heroine, is a delightful comedienne. But Invitation to a March is as inconsequentially contemporary as a beach house, and about equally built on sand.

New Musical on Broadway

The Unsaleable Molly Brown (book by Richard Morris; music and lyrics by Meredith Willson) recounts—and where need be, rearranges—the true-life story of the illiterate Irish gal (Tammy Grimes) from Hannibal, Mo. who went forth into the world with a stout heart and flying fists to kayo success. She married a miner (Harve Presnell) who doted on her and, when he struck it rich, hid $300,000 in a stove, where it was burned to a crisp. When he struck it richer, she carted him to Denver, got mauled trying to crash society, and carted him to Europe. He in time went back to Leadville and his saloon pals; she in time survived the Titanic ; and the two of them—in the theater— are reunited at the end.

The chronicle of Molly Brown’s society tumbles at home and her triumphs among the titled abroad is not only made the crude Maggie and Jiggs stuff it may often have been but is given an unvarying funny-paper treatment. The show, too, has an altogether loose-leaf structure, while the Meredith Willson score is not up to The Music Man’s and has nothing as infectious as Seventy-Six Trombones. But it gives a kind of joyous blare to the evening; along the way there is some nice dancing, rowdy in Leadville, chic in Monte Carlo; there are some funny remarks; and from time to time, there is some funny business.

But what plainly just keeps The Unsinkable Molly Brown afloat is an unquenchable Tammy Grimes. Starting off, in potato-sack finery, half tomboy and half troll, she roars and soars ahead with her magically rusty vocal cords, her magically uncombed look, her meltable rock-candy hardness, now executing a slow, sneakered, ragamuffin saraband, now after a Denver fiasco ripping into an exuberant barefoot dance, now smashing a chair over a stranger’s head, now reacting in Paris to her first taste of snails: “With that sauce, you could eat erasers.” Thanks to her, Molly is dripping but undrowned.