The Theater: The Army Takes to Drink

Finding low-cost shows that will go over big in Army camps has been a headache: the boys want the dolled-up leg shows they can’t always get, all too often get routine stuff they don’t want. But in Virginia the Richmond Defense Service Unit of OCD has lately struck gold in an abandoned mine. Again & again at Camp Lee and Fort Eustis, that venerable grog-flogger. Ten Nights in a Barroom, has left the boys looping.

As produced, the play is pretty much old rotgut in a new bottle. Subtitled See What the Boys in the Back Room Will Have, the show has been given a special musical score, some vaudeville trimmings, considerable entr’activity. A good-looking girl in a slinky dress perches for the evening atop a piano, and between scenes, leads the boys in such old favorites as The Old Gray Mare, The Bowery.

The hammiest scenes and lines have been left intact, and are played straight. The barkeeper and the gambler leer, sneer, entrap their victims. Joe the drunkard wrestles in agony with the demon rum; his little daughter quavers Father, Dear Father, Come Home With Me Now, and later dies; Joe remorsefully swears off liquor with the old gag, “I’ll never drop another drink—I mean drink another drop.” The gambler stabs the squire’s son, and the barkeeper’s son slugs his old man to death with a gin bottle.

Hissing, booing, wisecracking, the boys in the audience get plenty of noise out of their systems. And the volunteer cast, which includes a bank clerk, a jeweler, a librarian and a coal salesman, have themselves the time of their lives.