Theatre: Renewed Repertory

Top-hats and no-hats bobbed enthusiastically through the hideous foyer of Manhattan’s Civic Repertory Theatre in grimy 14th Street one evening last week. Men in leather coats from Greenwich Village and tailcoats from Murray Hill, women in city silks and country tweeds were there to celebrate the return of Actress-Producer Eva Le Gallienne from her sabbatical year and the reopening of her famed dramatic workshop, closed all last year. Anything the Repertory company might have put on for its début would have excited cheers from its devoted following. The audience was still howling gratefully long after the critics had left to write their praiseful reviews of Liliom, in which Miss Le Gallienne and Joseph Schildkraut revived the parts which made them and the Theatre Guild famous in 1921.

The settings were not by Lee Simonson, the carousel tune was different and portly Dudley Digges was not Liliom’s evil friend “Sparrow.” Otherwise, the Repertory’s Molnar revival was moment for moment the play of eleven years back. Actor Schildkraut, strutting, slapping the girls, blowing his nose with his hand, interprets the character of a sideshow barker who has nothing to be admired save an abiding arrogance which he carries with him up to and through the gates of perdition. Miss Le Gallienne, as the servant girl whom he lives with, beats and foolishly dies for, gives an eagerly suppressed impersonation. To hear her haltingly read the Sermon on the Mount while Liliom lies dead on the police stretcher is easily worth the Repertory’s $1.65 top admission price. The theatre’s repertoire for the first two weeks includes Liliom and three old favorites: Camille, Peter Pan, The Three Sisters.