Play in Boards

SKYLARK--Samson Raphaelson--Knopf ($2).

As a playwright and screen writer, Samson Raphaelson is as good as they come. His light comedies (The Jazz Singer, Young Love, Accent on Youth) not only packed them in, critics liked them too, praised their deftness, wit, freshness. But Broadway and Hollywood are not Parnassus. Skylark, a fluffy first novel originally written as a play (serialized in the Satevepost as Streamlined Heart), last week proved that Samson Raphaelson's stuff is better on boards than in them.

The story of a neglected wife, Skylark tells how Lydia Kenyon, wife of a $50,000-a-year Manhattan adman, discovered her husband was sleeping with his business, broke up that romance by curing him of the desire to be a big shot. The novel's dialogue ("She's a woman, she's life itself --she makes the grass grow, see? She's a skylark"), its improbable characters and adroit situations, may sound more convincing on the stage than in print. Manhattanites may have a chance to find out next autumn, when ebullient Gertrude Lawrence, who toured in the play last spring, opens it on Broadway.

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