New Plays in Manhattan

Everybody's Welcome is a musi-comedy version of last season's comedy Up Pops the Devil, which retains just enough of the original story & dialog to provide Frances Williams, Oscar Shaw, Jack Sheehan and Cecil Lean with an adequate background for their monkey business. Love in a Greenwich Village flat becomes love in a penthouse, with the Empire State Building (minus the new red light) instead of the moon looking benevolently through the window. Mild satire on the writing business becomes broad burlesque of the giant "Proxy" cinemansion. A minor character in the original play becomes Frances Williams and runs away with the show. She cuts up with Jack Sheehan, does an imitation of Hope Williams (no relation or friend of Frances) and sings three good songs, one funny ("I Shot the Works"), one tuneful ("As Time Goes By"), one both ("Is Rhythm Necessary?").

Lacking anything to make it distinguished, Everybody's Welcome has enough of everything to make it diverting. Oscar Shaw & Harriette Lake sing a silly song ("Lease in My Heart") so well that it will probably become a minor hit. (Two nights after the play opened "As Time Goes By" was a major hit in Manhattan nightclubs.) Flexible little Ann Pennington dances as well as ever; the Albertina Rasch Girls give one good number, one poor one (pseudo-bolero). Funniest number: Thomas Harty in a crazy, drunken dance.

The Cat & The Fiddle is a tuneful concert by Jerome Kern which frames a little love story by Librettist Otto Har-bach. The scene, a bit on the lush side and pleasingly so, is laid in Brussels and Louvain' where Miss Bettina Hall and George S. Metaxa, two musicians, alternately fall in & out of each other's arms until the final curtain.

Unhappily, neither Miss Hall nor Mr. Metaxa have very attractive voices. Miss Hall belongs to that school of musicomedy prima donnas which signifies its charm and purity by assuming too, too graceful postures, willowing all over the stage. Most of the excellent Kern melodies seem to be thrown away in the pit as incidental music, but there are two numbers--"She Didn't say 'Yes'" and "One Moment Alone"--which are memorable.

Decidedly on the credit side are gingery performances by Comedian Eddie Foy Jr., the man who can imitate a seal, and sprightly Doris Carson, who always seems to have a better time than anyone else in the house.

A Church Mouse. Some doubt exists as to whether all Hungarian plays not written by Ferenc Molnar are originally dull, or if their dullness is due to the unerringly wooden touch of Frederick & Fanny Hatton who adapt most of them to the U. S. stage. Last month Laszlo Fodor's I Love an Actress was presented in Manhattan. Like an interesting photographic landscape, it had form and pattern but no color. Equally lifeless is A Church Mouse, another load of Fodor which relates the story of a drab little girl who has cunning enough to persuade a rich man to let her replace his mistress-secretary, finally to make her his wife. The element which made I Love an Actress bearable is also present in A Church Mouse: breathless little Ruth Gordon, cast in the heroine's role.

Lean Harvest is the latest hit imported from London. To judge by this piece and other recent successes like Rope's End and Payment Deferred, the English are a grim lot.

The product of Ronald Jeans, Lean Harvest is concerned with the rise & fall of Nigel Trent (Leslie Banks), who evidently never heard the story about Lazarus at the Rich Man's gate or how hard it is for a camel to get through the needle's eye. Resolutely he sets out to make his fortune, so resolutely that he leaves his first love in the lurch. From this lurch his hackwriting brother Steven rescues her and marries her, while Nigel begins mak-ing a name for himself in the City. Then Nigel marries Celia (Vera Allen), meets one of the drollest men that ever cadged a Martini, Philip Downes (Nigel Bruce).

Nigel grows prematurely older, assumes a sturdy financial stodginess, loses contact with his wife whom he loves, becomes Sir Nigel and acquires several hundred thousand pounds worth of the root-of-all-evil. One night his sensitive and poiseful wife gives a big party. Tired and worried, he is cornered by an enthusiastic fanatic (Paula Bauersmith) whose palaver about people's auras bores him infinitely. It is at the close of this party that his wife decides to run away with jolly Actor Bruce. Then her husband suffers a stroke, dies in the delirium, shouts, jangles and discords of an overworked mind. The sermon of Playwright Jeans is delivered in the closing moments of the play when it is indicated that impoverished Brother Steven & wife are about to let Nigel's money, which they have inherited, wreck them too.

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