Theater: Disaster Area

The Girl Who Came to Supper will make the average theatrical gourmet yearn for the company of the late Monty Woolley. Even in his grave, George S. Kaufman could think up funnier lines than Harry Kurnitz has been able to confect for this musical adaptation of Terence Rattigan’s The Sleeping Prince. And Noel Coward could have given Supper some Noel Coward songs, instead of the badly toasted marshmelodies he actually provided for it. This part of Broadway can legitimately be declared a disaster area, except for those involuntary rescue squads, the theater parties, which will keep the show green for a while with money.

Supper turns the musical-comedy clock back to operetta, costumed in My Fair Lady style and set in London, where a royal delegation has arrived from the mythical kingdom of Carpathia for the coronation of George V. José Ferrer is a middle-aging, sleep-around prince, though he acts more like a wooden horse. His fancy, his fury, and his fate is to seduce a visiting American showgirl (Florence Henderson), a sunny birdbrain incubated in Wisconsin. Between Ferrer’s dead-pained expression and Henderson’s unvaryingly cheery smile, the pair manage to drive away all thoughts of sex and romance.

There is one authentic yawn stifler in Supper, an inspired import from the British music halls named Tessie O’Shea. The O’Shea is fat and sassy, swoops about like a bat on a binge, and pitches irresistibly into a medley of cockney nostalgia, as in Don’t Take Our Charlie for the Army. Tessie O’Shea has no relation whatever to the plot of The Girl Who Came to Supper. Lucky lady.