Film and Radio Guide (Oct 1945-Jun 1946)

24 FILM AND RADIO GUIDE Volume XII, No. 7 The Play's the Thing BY FLORA RHETA SCHREIBER "The Would-Be Gent-lemon" Bobby Clark has a way with Congreve, Sheridan, and Moliere. His own way. Currently, in Michael Todd’s production, he approaches Moliere’s The Would-Be Gentleman as he has approached Congreve’s Love For Love and Sheridan’s The Rivals — as if the play had never had a performance before, as though it were written yesterday, finishing touches added hurriedly this morning, especially for Bobby Clark. Bobby Clark behaves as if he had never heard of Moliere — that is, with a mercifully beautiful freedom from academic awe. The result is that Moliere’s play serves as the framework for delightful, madcap improvisation. It ceases to be a satire on the nouveau riche and becomes the occasion of resounding belly laughs and joyous guffaws. One thinks of the image of laughter holding both his sides, of Sir Toby Belch, of Falstaff. The abandon of the production is complete and exhilarating. Even though the law of diminishing returns begins to operate as antics and capers suffer from repetition, this is a superlatively good show. Particularly the early part. "Lute Song" Michael Myerberg, who had the courage to present Thornton Wilder’s Skin of Our Teeth after it had been turned down by less enterprising producers, now gives us Lute Song. Again Mr. Myerberg shows courage. For Lute Song might easily have miscarried. For one thing, it is an adaptation of an adaptation. For another, it is both simple and earnest. But it did not miscarry. This is a production of compelling beauty. The simple folk-story is of a country wife and her scholar husband. The wife sends the husband to the capital for government examinations. He is more of a success than was anticipated. But he is the slave of his success, for he is detained and forcibly married to a princess. All unknowing, his wife waits. She goes through a famine, sells her hair to bury her husband’s parents, and then in the guise of a nun wanders through the country. At long last she finds her husband who, at first, doesn’t know her. In the end, though, through the magnanimous intercession o f the princess, the lovers are reunited. The story is simple, the characters (all but the husband’s mother) idealized, yet the play has the breath of humanity. One watches this lavish production, brilliant in its pageantry, with wide-eyed wonder. And one is passionately concerned that everything turn out right. Mary Martin, most recently seen in One Touch of Venus, plays the wife with graceful earnestness — which is difficult to achieve, since earnestness usually leads to tenseness. Yul Brynner plays the distraught husband, whose heart is heavier than his gold-quilted costume. Mildred Dunnock as the mother, Cassandra-like in foreseeing catastrophe, suspicious and nagging when catastrophe comes. gives a moving performance. McKay Morris makes the grandiose prince plausible. The most difficult acting assignment falls to Helen Craig, who plays the princess-wife. The princess is neither heroine nor villain. She means well, but she is not real. Clearly she is pure cleus-ex-machina for reuniting the husband and wife. Helen Craig’s performance is dignified but stiff. The fault, as indicated, is not wholly hers. The sets, which are by Robert Edmond Jones, suggest grand opera. Maybe they suggest grand theatre, for it is exciting to be lifted out of the naturalism of the conventional three-act drawing-room set. In addition to grandeur, there is subdued beauty in these sets. They melt into each other with the unaffected ease of snow falling on snow, mingling and becoming one. Raymond Scott’s songs are tuneful and suitable. I don’t think any more can be said for them. They certainly don’t measure up to the grandeur of the sets nor to the solidness of most of the acting. Yeichi Nimura’s choreography is also merely adequate. Appealing in itself, it falls short of the potentialities for dance inherent in the script. Too often the occasion for dance gives way to mere parade. The adaptation is by the late Sidney Howard and Will Irwin from a French version of a famous fourteenth-century Chinese play, Pi-Pa-Ki. The direction is by John Houseman, once associated with Orson Welles in the experimental Mercury Theatre,