New Plays in Manhattan

Pal Joey (book by John O'Hara, music by Rodgers & Hart, produced by George Abbott). Since he came of age, John O'Hara has spent more time in nightclubs than many men have in bed. He has stayed till closing, seen all the sights, heard all the jargon. His short novel Pal Joey consists of the magnificently illiterate letters of a nightclub crooner and hoofer, an attractive, low and decidedly rubbery heel, describing his greedy world of mice and moola (women and money). Perhaps the most laudable thing about this character is that he might not betray the mice for the moola--but one can't be sure. Joey has now become the combination hero-and-heel of a bang-up George Abbott musi-comedy, a profane hymn to the gaudy goddess of metropolitan night life.

The play in O'Hara's slangy dialogue is gamy, funny, simple in outline: Joey is taken up by a Chicago society woman even harder than he is. She keeps him until she is tired of him, then gets the heel out of there. Meanwhile he has lost the affections of a nice young ingenue. Somehow the show performs the feat of making Joey an almost sympathetic character. As Joey, lean, dark Gene Kelly has a treacherous Irish charm, a sweet Irish tenor, a catlike dancing grace that makes vice almost as appealing as virtue. This impression is confirmed by Vivienne Segal as the loose Chicagoenne. More opulent than she used to be in the Ziegfeld Follies, in Helene Pons's svelte costumes she is a luscious miracle of corsetry.

The amours of these two are accompanied by all the dancing anyone could want and at least three more great Richard Rodgers tunes: I Could Write a Book (sweet), Love Is My Friend (torchy), Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered (catchy). Cigar-chewing Lyricist Lorenz Hart, the pint-sized genius with a two-quart capacity, abets the spirit of the occasion with leerics about zippers, canopied beds, secret telephones, mirrored ceilings, iniquity, chambermaids who are deaf, dumb & blind. Brazen little June Havoc, sister of Burlesqueen Gypsy Rose Lee, does a sidesplitting parody of all kinds of cafe singing and yields nothing to her sister in ability to make a rhinestone gown twitch with significance. In singing Zip, the show's funniest novelty song, a girl named Jean Casto, wearing horn-rimmed goggles and a tweedy sports ensemble, stops the show with the neatest trick of the musical-comedy year--a satire on a strip-tease in which she removes nothing more than her overcoat.

For those who can park their morals in the lobby, Pal Joey is a wow.

My Sister Eileen (by Joseph Fields & Jerome Chodorov, produced by Max Gordon). Several years ago The New Yorker ran some wry, funny sketches by Ruth McKenney describing the screwy plight of herself and her sister Eileen on first moving into Greenwich Village. Last week Eileen McKenney and her husband, Novelist Nathaniel West (Miss Lonely hearts, The Day of the Locust}, were killed in an auto accident while returning to California from a Mexican hunting trip. And last week sister Ruth's sketches were the basis of a new Broadway comedy hit, directed by George S. Kaufman.

The fictional sisters from Columbus, Ohio move into a characteristic Greenwich Village mare's nest--a furnished, one-room, basement apartment (with partitioned bathroom) suggesting a cross between a Gothic crypt and a rummage sale.

There Ruth (Shirley Booth) tries to write and Eileen (Jo Ann Sayers) hopes for a stage job. And there the sisters are placed in strange and typical Village jeopardies.

There are racking vibrations from a subway excavation just underneath. Drunks leer and bellow in the window. The Greek landlord raves about his paintings that deface the wall. There are uncomfortable visits from the previous tenant, a harlot, and some of her clients. Further annoyances are a drug clerk who brings Eileen unappetizing "specials" from his counter and a reporter whose mind is not on the news. A Rambling Wreck from Georgia Tech, waiting for the pro football season, is a tough protector to the girls but insists on lunging through their room in his underwear. Finally Ruth is followed home by six Brazilian naval officers.

In the end the girls seem well on their way to a saner life, but the comedy has conclusively proved the fact well known to residents that Greenwich Village is still full of loony threats and humors.

Old Acquaintance (by John van Druten, produced by Dwight Deere Wiman) is a treat for acting students. It puts two Big Names on the stage at once--Jane Cowl and Peggy Wood. They might try to mug each other out of the drama, but both have a full kit of the tricks of their trade and they show how mutually helpful such tricksters can be.

Jane Cowl can make a crumpled handkerchief as much of a dramatic asset as Barrymore's profile, Leon Errol's legs or W. C. Fields's illuminated nose. She has plenty of chance to use one here, where she finds herself in a trying erotic situation.

She is a Manhattan novelist who has a paramour in her publisher's office. Unfortunately her old friend and sister authoress, Peggy Wood, has a young daughter who takes the paramour's eye and eventually his heart. In three acts full of adroit handkerchief work Cowl runs a gamut of politely contained emotions and achieves resignation in the end--with the help of old acquaintance. At one point, where she snuffles back her tears, she brings off a little masterpiece of nasal dramatics. Meanwhile Peggy Wood has given a witty picture of a blonde, bird-brained, overdressed, likeable soul.

The play itself is less notable than the team of Cowl & Wood. Possibly such a love tangle would stay on the tactful, mannerly plane where Playwright van Druten keeps it. But the chances are that sometime, somewhere, there would be more fumes and fervors than the play reveals.

Its love fevers, unlike those outside the theatre, never so much as threaten to break the thermometer.

All In Fun (produced by Leonard Sillman). The producer of New Faces now offers a jumbled musical revue, a weird melange of good & bad, conscious & unconscious humor. Its chief asset is Bill ("Bojangles") Robinson, 62, colored, who eats four quarts of ice cream daily, holds the world's speed record for running backwards (75 yards in 8.2 seconds) and is the greatest tap dancer in existence. Also easily appreciated is Paul Gerrits, an urbane, roller-skating master of ceremonies, and big, pasty-faced Red Marshall, who serves up vintage burlesque, including a Pullman-car scene entitled Red Rails in the Sunset. In the midst of his uncouth designs on women who are merely trying to retire, he announces: "I usually go to sleep as soon as my feet touch the pillow." Among the less comprehensible" features of the performance are a song which compares love to heaven, hell and a Turkish delight, and another called April in Harrisburg which may have been intended as a parody on Vernon Duke's April in Paris but is played absolutely straight. Whether the company intended them or not, the show is almost solid with laughs.

Meet The People (produced by The Hollywood Theatre Alliance) is the Manhattan version of the leftish little revue put together in Los Angeles last year by young screen folk who tried to make a lark out of their distaste for Hollywood and Conditions Generally. It appeals in a genial, lively way to those who like social messages in syncopated time and aren't too particular about really instinctive talent and personality.

Best talent: Jack Gilford, who does an imitation, at once funny and narcotic, of a man trying to stay awake at a pep meeting of the "Hoard Motor Co." Typical piece of ragtime sociology: a mass strip number exposing union labels.

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