The Theater: New Plays on Broadway, Oct. 26, 1959

Chéri, like Gigi, was adapted from Colette by Anita Loos. As Gigi hoisted a young girl, Audrey Hepburn, into the limelight, Chéri may hoist a young man, Horst Buchholz. Playing the title role, this European film actor manages—not wholly through ability but through his matinee-idol appearance—to be the most effective part of a generally empty show. He plays the overindulged, sexually precocious, humanly immature son of a pre-World War I grande cocotte, who has brought him up to make a rich marriage.

But before he makes it, he has a long affair with a cocotte (Kim Stanley) twice his age.

For both the teen-age Chéri and his between-age Léa, life is over at the end of Act I—and so is the play. Thereafter, the two can only mope while apart, come uneasily together, then part once more. When they meet, they talk too much, weep too much, morali e too much. Between whiles, Chéri chiefly features amusing-looking demireps, whose talk is incredibly dull. Eventually Léa. at 60, reaches the age of content, but Chéri kills himself.

Fairly interesting while chronicling its love affair, Chéri afterward does little realistically with fractured lives, little nostalgically with fragrant memories. There is no more wit to its frivolous scenes than depth to its sober ones. The audience can only watch a lost young man and a woman who gets older and older. At whatever age, Kim Stanley proves a gifted actress, but she seems about as Gallic as cornflakes and as demimondaine as Betsy Ross. She is forever fighting a role as well as a script.

Golden Fleecing (by Lorenzo Semple Jr.) bears one of those pun-propelled titles that proclaim a farcical text. And farcical Golden Fleecing is, without being farcical enough. Concerned with three U.S. Navy men in Venice who plot to win fortunes at roulette by using their ship’s “top-secret” mechanical computer, it involves signals between harbor and hotel suite, their own admiral in the suite below, the admiral’s inevitably winsome daughter, signalmen who pass out, couples who dive into canals, Venetian glass, Venetian gangsters, and phones that stop ringing only when doorbells start.

But despite a whole arsenal of props and an agreeable assemblage of players, topped by TV’s Tom Poston, Golden Fleecing is into the second act before it explodes into laughter. Then it expires in the third. Playwright Semple cannot solve the author’s great problem of getting his people into trouble while staying out of it himself. He is too laborious tying his yarn in knots, too predictable untying it. Amid Director Abe Burrows’ sharp whipcracking, there is too much forced wisecracking; amid a great many antics, there is never quite enough fun.