Old Play in Manhattan

The Would-Be Gentleman (adapted from Moliere's Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme by Bobby Clark; produced by Michael Todd) was for 276 years a satiric comedy. Last week it became a slaphappy farce. Adapter Clark first cut up Moliere's tale of an upstart boob who ached to shine in high society. Then Actor Clark cut up in it. The result, here & there, is as hilarious as it is heterodox. But mostly it falls flat.

Seventeenth-Century Moliere (real name: Jean Baptiste Poquelin) might have been a little startled at what has happened to his doltish M. Jourdain, who was already an outrageous enough butt. Everybody swindled and snickered at him--the dancing masters and fencing masters hired to teach him the graces; the count who was to present him at court; the marquise with whom he craved a modish liaison. But Moliere's butt--who suddenly learned with rapture that he had been speaking prose all his life--was a passably solid character. When Zany Clark gets through with him, M. Jourdain has not a shred of character left: he is merely a comic named Bobby Clark. He is often as knowing as M. Jourdain is naive; he is oftener mad for sex than for high society.

Yet only a pedant would rap Bobby Clark for his lively irreverence. As satire, The Would-Be Gentleman is by now both too hackneyed and too broad, and it never was much as a play. Careening through it, or pausing to leer, gag and gurgle his soup, Bobby gives it some high moments of low comedy. But most of the time he is held in chains by the script, or is in a sweat from wriggling out of them.

A comic who appeals to both crowd and clerisy, 57-year-old Bobby Clark has clicked in virtually every form of show business. Until 1936 he was the better half of the great vaudeville comedy team of Clark & McCullough. After his partner's suicide, he went on--as very few survivors of famous stage partnerships have--to achieve greater fame on his own.

Clark's success rests partly on skill: he knows cold every comedy trick that vaudeville and burlesque, those hardest of taskmasters, can teach. But his success rests equally on personality. He is the little man who is a little mad; the fellow who, leering behind painted specs or grr-r-ring like a wolf, seems ready to leap at a woman or over a wall. Meanwhile, he remains in frantic, if aimless motion. There are more explosive comics (Durante, for one) than Bobby Clark; but none in whom so much seems just about to explode.

Flip-Flops to Congreve. Robert Edwin Clark was born, a train conductor's son, in Springfield, Ohio. His first job was carrying papers--"not selling them, mind you. I had a route--I didn't stand on a corner prostituting my art." As a boy he did flip-flops with Paul McCullough in the backyard. The two practiced acrobatics, soon got jobs on the small time. For 30 years they appeared in tent shows, minstrel shows, circuses, burlesque, vaudeville, the Ziegfeld Follies.

After McCullough's death, Bobby made his first solo flight in the Follies, was a success from his first scene. Since then he has starred in such musicals as The Streets of Paris (with his wow song, I'm Robert the Roue from Reading, P-A), Star and Garter, Mexican Hayride. But twice before The Would-Be Gentleman, Bobby has shed his painted specs to enliven the classics. As Ben the Sailor he romped through Congreve's Love for Love, as Bob Acres in The Rivals he made "the role look as if a storm had swept over it."

Offstage, Bobby Clark is intensely serious and quiet, "the most unfunny man," says Producer Todd, "that I know." Bobby himself feels very sad that he never went to college: "Think of all the things I will never know--about compressed air. for instance."

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