Shaw-Inspiring Spectacle

From a 45-year-old play, the Army & Navy Relief Funds benefited handsomely last week, but a thirsty theater public benefited more. Revived with an all-star cast at special Broadway matinees, Shaw's Candida was greeted by despairing critics the way castaways greet a ship.

With a cast that donated their services and worked in perfect harmony, Shaw's comedy (of a radiant woman fought over by her stuffy parson of a husband and her mooning poet of a suitor) had an acquired warmth as well as a residual wit. In the title role which she first played in New York in 1924 and again in 1937, Katharine Cornell was this time much more human, much less conscious of her own radiance. Raymond Massey and Dudley Digges made Candida's sermonizing husband understandable, her scoundrelly father amusing. As the angular Prossy, Mildred Natwick, concurrently giving eight performances a week as the comic medium in Blithe Spirit, reached her comic high in Candida. But best of all was Private Burgess Meredith who, on leave from the Army with only four days to rehearse in, became the only bearable Marchbanks that anyone could remember --a winning poet rather than a whining one.

So great was the public response that five more performances were given this week, to net Army & Navy relief about $30,000 in all. Even G.B.S., toughest of businessmen, cabled that he would waive royalties in spite of being "taxed to the point of penury.''

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