Best Plays in Manhattan

SERIOUS

PORGY--The last week of the Theatre Guild's spectacular play about low, black fishermen who live along the stormy wharves of Charleston (TIME, Oct. 24).

STRANGE INTERLUDE--Eugene O'Neill's solemn survey of a woman who tries to make three living men compensate for a dead lover (TIME, Feb. 13).

FUNNY

THE ROYAL FAMILY--Stage celebrities photographed in a family group (TIME, Jan. 9).

THE BACHELOR FATHER--In which a surly but kind-hearted libertine rallies his bastards round him. June Walker is the most chipper chip of the old block (TIME, March 12).

VOLPONE--The career of a Venetian money-glutton in the days before Venice was the Niagara Falls of the upper classes (TIME, April 23).

EXCITING

THE TRIAL OF MARY DUGAN--A chorine, haled into court for murder, uses her guile to disprove her guilt (TIME, Oct. 3).

THE SILENT HOUSE--Ring around the rosie played by Chinese dope-dealers and a London debutante (TIME, Feb. 20).

THE FRONT PAGE--One man's beat is another man's poison and other journalistic axioms displayed with extreme rapidity and skill (TIME, June 4, Aug. 27).

MUSICAL

Fun: Good News, A Connecticut Yankee, Show Boat, Rain or Shine, Blackbirds of 1928, George White's Scandals, Earl Carroll's Vanities.