New Plays in Manhattan

Goodbye, My Fancy (by Fay Kanin; produced by Michael Kanin in association with Richard Aldrich & Richard Myers) tells of a glamorous, liberal-thinking Congresswoman named Agatha Reed (Madeleine Carroll), who, 20 years after being expelled from college, goes back for an honorary degree. The young professor for love of whom she had been expelled is now the college president (Conrad Nagel). He and Agatha discover that they still love each other, and decide to marry.

But the man, Agatha finds, has changed; he is principally concerned with pleasing trustees and avoiding trouble. She has brought trouble along with her, in the shape of an anti-war propaganda film that the trustees refuse to have shown. Egged on by a cocky LIFE photographer (Sam Wanamaker) who is also in love with her, Agatha bludgeons--in fact, blackmails--her fiance into letting the film be shown. He wins out over the trustees, but for all that, loses the lady.

Goodbye, My Fancy is a reasonably diverting play, raised a notch higher by a smooth production. In her Broadway debut, Cinemactress Carroll is excellent; she catches the lure, the charm, the strong-mindedness demanded by the role. But Goodbye, My Fancy, after a bright beginning, becomes here a little too slick and there a little too slack. Playwright Kanin so much admires the characters with principles that she has no feeling for the characters with problems; she seems both a cardboard crusader and a complacent one. But the very shallowness of the play proves a kind of virtue: the whole thing can just be considered entertainment.

Light Up the Sky (by Moss Hart; produced by Joseph M. Hyman & Bernard Hart) is a sort of venomous paean to show business. With a veteran's often bitter knowledge, Playwright Moss Hart has chronicled the out-of-town opening of an ambitious $300,000 drama. In a hotel suite before the performance, the swishy director (Glenn Anders), the splashy producer (Sam Levene) and the gushy leading lady (Virginia Field) spray the atmosphere with love, and the idealistic young playwright with admiration. Six hours later, when the show seems to be a flop, the playwright is denounced as the Arch Fiend. But when the early morning papers dub it a potential hit, the hatchets are put away and the harps begin to twang again.

The whole thing is slambang, cutthroat stuff: it flings vanity and vulgarity in bucketfuls, like swill. It is, to be sure, burlesque; but burlesque, in some cases, of theater types for whom mere satire might be understatement. Yet its most successful moments stem from the actual small details of show business, and its most entertaining characters--the star's mother (Phyllis Povah) and the producer's wife (Audrey Christie)--are lowbrow rather than outrageous.

Light Up the Sky is more harsh than funny. It has very little wit--its long suit is billingsgate; and its most valuable asset is the malice displayed by everybody (and not least by the author*). At the end Mr. Hart has all his characters behaving beautifully again, and even implies that show folk are all just high strung screwballs anyway. It is a little as if, having blurted all the unpleasant truths he could think of, Mr. Hart blandly winds up with: "It was all just a joke; I didn't really mean a word of it."

* Part of the fun for first-nighters was trying to identify the characters with real stage folk. Wiseacres were certain that they could spot traces of Actress Gertrude Lawrence, Producer Billy Rose (and his wife Eleanor Holm), etc., etc.

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