Theatre: Curtain Up

At Manhattan’s Center Theatre, Virginia, the Rockefeller extravaganza, was grossing $27,000 in true Rockefeller fashion, as it has been for three weeks. But to Broadway the Center is in a class with the old Hippodrome, so the distinction of opening the 1937-38 theatrical season was reserved last week for three comedies which cropped up several blocks to the west.

Appropriately, first of the three shows to raise its curtain was presented by John C. Wilson, Noel Coward’s U. S. representative who temporarily sidestepped that association and put on Excursion last spring on his own hook, thus becoming the past season’s most promising freshman producer. Of the other two productions, one was offered by a very oldtimer, the other by a pair of Johnny-come-latelies. The casts of two shows were livened by the appearance of two big-time cinema performers, only one play was written by a U. S. citizen and none was likely to survive the first snow.

George and Margaret, the Wilson show, was written by 27-year-old Gerald Savory while he was unemployed. Many of its lines were inspired, according to him, by retorts he thought of too late to say to bobbies, servants, uppity people. The play’s long run in London and the sale of cinema rights are said to have disqualified him for the dole by some $150,000.

George and Margaret lives up to the reputation of current English humor for amiability and mildness. Dedicated to the principle that everything is for the best, it revolves around a crazy but comfortable family of five. Mother Alice (Irene Browne) is a congenital fussbudget, Father Malcolm’s (Morland Graham) absentmindedness verges on the sublime, Daughter Frankie (Rosalyn Boulter) suffers from vestal restlessness, piano-playing Brother Dudley (Arthur Macrae) spouts Noel Coward and badgers stuffy Brother Claude (Richard Warner), who builds houses and does setting-up exercises. Clouds gather over the breakfast table when Gladys, the maid (Moya Nugent), is found crying near the sausages and Frankie reports she saw Claude coming out of the girl’s room. Two acts and a fortnight later, just in time for the arrival of much-discussed and dreaded guests, the domestic weather settles fair.

Manhattan audiences that took the madcaps of You Can’t Take It With You to their bosoms had at least a friendly nod for the funny Sycamores’ British cousins. First acting prize went to Gladys Henson as the new maid, Beer, a name that suits her perfectly. Her getup, contortions, expressive voicelessness and eye-rolling, best described by what psychiatrists call “heavenly nystagmus,” save an otherwise flat and conventional conclusion.

The Lady Has a Heart (by Ladislaus Bus-Fekete; adapted by Edward Roberts; Rufus Phillips & Watson Barratt. producers). On the nearly sure-fire theme of The Admirable Crichton—the butler who turns out to be a better man than the rest of them—a competent cast headed by beautiful Vincent Price and lissome Elissa Landi amble through a pleasant play that occasionally skitters along the edge of being a tour de farce. Actor Price is the same restrained, terribly patient young man that he was as Albert in Victoria Regina.

Jean (Vincent Price) is the fourth-generation butler and valet to the Mariassy family. Old Count Mariassy (Lumsden Hare), perennially in-&-out Prime Minister of Hungary, cannot so much as button his waistcoat without Jean’s help, boasts that in this admirably efficient and self-effacing young man he has the perfect servant. What is the Mariassy family’s dismay to discover that Jean has been elected to Parliament as a Socialist deputy. The first shock over, Count Mariassy is rather tickled, but his daughter (Elissa Landi) is furious. Jean continues to serve as loyal valet, but things can never be the same again. As Elissa Landi bitterly remarks: “At home Jean ties father’s cravat, and in Parliament he tries to cut his throat.” Jean’s double job is too much for him: Count Mariassy does not mind being called “a political ventriloquist” in public, but he hates having his beer warm and his bath cold. Soon Count Mariassy’s Conservatives are swept out; Jean is the coming man. At this point Elissa Landi’s hatred of the upstart valet turns out not to be hatred after all.

Hungarian Bus-Fekete, onetime architect, is now one of Europe’s most successful playwrights, is under contract to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

Blow Ye Winds (by Valentine Davies; Arthur Hopkins, producer) does little for the national honor. Producer Hopkins, who has had scant success for nearly a decade, perennially mourns the death of the theatre, blames the critics and the cinema, but returns to the stage with admirable perseverance. Along with scores of producing colleagues, he has recently seemed to suffer from script-trouble. In the opinion of most observers, Blow Ye Winds is another symptom of it.

The play’s situation entangles a boy in love with boats and a lady Ph.D. immersed in case histories. Christine Lawrence, virgin psychologist (Doris Daiton), meets young Skipper Hayden Chase (Henry Fonda), who distrusts learning and takes out fishing parties on the cutter which he bought after leaving Dartmouth. Despite the disparity of their interests, they fall in love, spending a night together when he jams his boat on a convenient sand bar. Love triumphs temporarily when Hayden takes a job in the city and marriage follows. Then their incompatibility leads them through quarrels to the brink of divorce, and then love triumphs again.

The last time Henry Fonda appeared on the Broadway stage he was skippering an Erie Canal boat in The Farmer Takes a Wife. His sleepy-eyed, lethargic charm has since done him yeoman service in Hollywood but somehow seems a bit too somnolent now that he is back in Manhattan on his sailboat. Doris Dalton makes a pleasingly limber heroine.