Performing Elephant

Variety doped it as a white elephant, for which there are no stables on Broadway. But it was coming this week, anyway--a huge (36 scenes, nine carloads of props) staging of Jules Verne's Around the World in 80 Days. Producer-Director-Actor-Magician Orson Welles would not be in the Broadway cast, though it had taken all of him to keep the show moving on the road.

In New Haven, when the flicker which opens the show refused to flick, the unperturbed Welles cracked: "This just proves what many of us in the theater have felt right along . . . movies are not here to stay."

Later, when a cowpoke quaffed a "prairie pickup" ("straight formaldehyde with a black widder spider ridin' the olive"), his crepe whiskers fell off. Ad-libbed Actor Welles: "Mighty pow'ful stuff, that likker. Burns the whiskers right off'n a man's face."

Last week in Philadelphia, Around the World was still caught in its own propwash. During one of Orson's magic acts a pigeon flapped to the top of the house, committed a nuisance on the customers. Said one: "The pigeon was a good dramatic critic."

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