Who, What, When, Where, How

Long lacking has been a concise, up-to-date, inexpensive encyclopedia of the theatre. The Theatre Handbook and Digest of Plays (Crown, $3), out last week, adequately fills the need. It is marred by too much sloppy writing and too many canned opinions; but inside its 900 pages Editor Bernard Sobel--a veteran of Broadway--has crammed a vast amount of useful information about the theatre's thousands of years.

Besides summarizing hundreds of plays and spotting hundreds of players and playwrights, the book touches such stray topics as theatrical cemeteries, the 36 Dramatic Situations, explains a mass of technical terms and theatre lingo. Experts have written its longer articles: Raymond Massey on Acting, John Mason Brown on Criticism, Lucius Beebe on First Nights, William Fields on Press Agents, Aline Bernstein on Costumes, Arthur Richman on Playwrighting.

Besides its value as a reference volume, the book is strewn with many a gleaning for the curious. Samples:

P: Once, when the curtain went up on the second act of a Broadway musical, the cast was astounded to find itself playing to an empty house. During the intermission, the audience had learned of the sinking of the Titanic.

P: Simon Pure and Mrs. Grundy were characters in 18th-Century plays.

P: In theatre slang, they're handcuffed: an audience which does not applaud; chew the scenery: to rant; flag: curtain; and cakes: the manager pays the actor's board; playing to the gas: a miserably small audience.

P: The Duke of Windsor, when Prince of Wales, scandalized the English by appearing, in women's clothes, in a piece called The Bathroom Door.

P: When G.. K. Chesterton first saw the blazing advertising signs along the Great White Way, he commented: "What a wonderful sight for a person who cannot read!"

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