The Theater: New Recital on Broadway, Sep. 26, 1960

The World of Carl Sandburg, if not everybody’s world, has long been a popular one. Over the years Sandburg, who was first a poet of the pioneering Midwest school, has sifted down into a people’s poet, a patriarch with a song bag on his shoulder and a new song on his lips. He can be pithy or philosophic, can speak from the heart while poking the funny bone, and speak tenderly of babies and bad women and sad men, and speak up for dreams, and speak out against war, and be often crackerbarrel and occasionally caustic. America has always fancied down-to-earth figures who look up at the stars and whose voices can both ring out and drawl, and in the 82-year-old Sandburg it has a notable specimen.

As Norman Corwin has adapted it for the stage and Bette Davis and Leif Erickson act it out, Sandburg’s world remains dramatically mild, a little ostentatiously benign, its warm iron-kettle juices mingling the flavor of sage and ham. At its best, an evening whose themes move from the cradle to the grave is both folkish and individual. Often it is less folkish than folksy, and at its worst it is cute enough to make J. M. Barrie seem austere. Nor do Corwin’s comments help: instead of stressing the pungent and appealing in Sandburg, he hails him for leaving “obscurantism to the esthetes.” But it may be that what Sandburg is leaving to the esthetes is poetry itself. Aside from bits of writing that sound like Biblical commercials, Gorwin’s commentary is serviceable. Helped by Guitarist Clark Allen and an opening night appearance by Sandburg himself—who received a standing ovation—the two stars offer a sound recital. Leif Erickson has the right vigor and directness, and if Bette Davis substitutes very high-styled authority for homespun warmth, this is probably all to the good—the real danger was not toughness but tremolo.