New Play in Manhattan

The Seven Year Itch (by George Axelrod) bagged a batch of fine reviews on opening night. It possesses a lively popular theme. It is full of humorous, situations. It boasts an engaging leading man. What it lacks, unfortunately, is any real merit as a play.

The story concerns Richard Sherman, a married New Yorker whose wife is away for the summer. Married for seven years and on earth for almost 40, he has reached that half-wolfish, half-mousy point when the eye begins to wander but the ego to worry, when Caspar Milquetoast sounds an alarm clock on Walter Mitty's dreams. There is an attractive young lady (Vanessa Brown) who lives in the apartment above Richard, and with whom he gets very pleasantly enmeshed. But there is a gaudy imagination and a lurid conscience that live within him, through which he gets enmeshed even more. At times, he prowls about the apartment babbling to himself, or (being a book publisher) confides his lusts and guilts to a psychoanalyst author.

Between Richard's fall from virtue and all his nights from reality, the play takes complete summer inventory of him. There are some genuinely funny moments, and Tom Ewell, a naturally funny man, plays Richard with as much drollery and as little coyness as the part allows. But people who don't want everything lip-smackingly spelled out for them will find much of the play a bore. It is less a play, in fact, than an anthology of familiar little situations, a lot of them banged out too loud and too long. In The Seven Year Itch, sex is something that not so much rears its head as never once lowers it. Rather than freshness of finesse, the play exhibits an astute sense of the obvious.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.