The Theatre: New Plays in Manhattan: Dec. 13, 1937

Hooray For What! (book by Howard Lindsay and Russel Grouse; music by Harold Arlen; lyrics by E. Y. Harburg; produced by the Shuberts). Coming after bad advance reports, last-minute cast trouble, and fears that Ed Wynn had been so bad on the radio that he would keep a theatre audience away, Hooray For What! proved to be an ingratiating show, with Comic Wynn just as funny as he used to be. Sometimes the plot shuffled dully between old-fashioned musicomedy and pretentious satire, but it ceases to matter when Ed Wynn comes on. wringing his hands as if he thought man would be better off without them. Like Chaplin, he has always been a little fellow, lost in an insane world of slickers. In that role he is both funny and sympathetic and never better than in the scene where he runs to a park bench to rest and read only to be badgered and bullied by some extraordinary performing dogs.

In Hooray For What! Wynn is an innocent from Sprinkle, Indiana, who has invented a gas to poison worms. He and the gas are taken to Geneva and used to make a war. If poison gas were a more humorous subject, the play might have been better. On its own or in other surroundings Paul Haakon’s “Hero Ballet” might have been brilliant. But it is flat in an Ed Wynn show.

Sharing credit with Wynn for the show’s success is able Vincente Minnelli, trained in the hard school of movie stage-shows, who directed it and designed the scenery.

Barchester Towers (adapted by Thomas Job from the novel by Anthony Trollope; produced by Guthrie McClintick). For many years Anthony Trollope, the prolific mid-19th Century novelist, worked as an inspector for the Irish Post Office and is credited with saving all subsequent generations of mankind many steps by inventing the street mailbox as a convenient place for posting letters. As a novelist he saved no words, for he wrote with great facility, reeling off his ambling tales with a quiet relish, at the rate of 2,500 words a morning. But although he held the mirror rather too close to the placid mediocrity of British life, he had a genuine ability to tell a story and to tell it with a sharp, shrewd bite.

Thomas Job, in dramatizing Bar Chester Towers, has altered the storytelling, removed the bite, like the gentlemen who dramatized Pride and Prejudice, Madame Bovary. Trollope’s Barchester Towers smacks appreciative lips over the pettiness of an English cathedral town, controlled by Mrs. Proudie, a mean woman and a real woman, wife of its weak-minded bishop.

In the play she is no longer real. Mr. Job reduced her to a bad caricature-foil for his heroine, Madeline Neroni. Made-line (Ina Claire), with her father who is in the Church and her brother, who is in embroidery, comes home from Italy and an unhappy marriage. Immediately bored with Barchester, she invents a limp, steals a stuffy clergyman from a stuffy blonde, acts like a younger, cuter Sanger child and, in a magnificently anticlimactic scene, puts her foolish enemies to shame. Along with all this goes a little pleasant dialog, a little minor plotting, a great deal of patronizing archness on the part of the playwright and his actors.

Even Miss Claire’s fashionable audience gave up giggling during the second act and sat back to chat in peace. Broadway connoisseurs were waiting for the big actress scene that would explain why she had chosen the play. The scene never came.

The Cradle Will Rock (music and words by Marc Blitzstein; presented by the Mercury Theatre). To John Houseman and Orson Welles, the producers of Julius Caesar (TIME, Nov. 22), Marc Blitzstein’s The Cradle Will Rock is an old problem. They tried to produce it in Manhattan last June for the WPA theatre, were stopped on dress rehearsal night by a mysterious order from above. Now, without benefit of Government, they present it on their own bare stage for special performances. Author Blitzstein sits on the stage, plays his music, occasionally joins the actors as they step forward to sing or speak his pieces. If this method is from necessity—the famous, misnamed Russian Realistic Theatre uses it from choice and with stunning effect—it proves, nevertheless, that if a playwright has enough to say he needs neither sets nor costumes to help him say it. What Mr. Blitzstein has to say concerns what happens to bosses and workers when a steel town goes on strike. If sometimes he uses stock characters and stock works, he more often uses bright, biting satire. The audience laughs out loud when the spoiled son and daughter of a steelmaster try to throw off their ill-natured boredom with a tinny song about spooning and crooning, when a college president and his professors shout mealy-mouthed patriotic jingo. There is good, contemptuous laughter behind The Cradle Witt Rock and that laughter gives the play its vigor.