Old Play in Manhattan

Room Service (by John Murray & Allen Boretz), at Manhattan's White Way Hotel, has gone downhill since 1937. George Abbott no longer directs operations there, and though the present staff (John Randolph, Everett Sloane, Jack Lemmon) is conscientious and willing, it lacks the ingratiating touch the old staff (Sam Levene, Philip Loeb, Teddy Hart) had. Even in 1937 that touch was decidedly needed: Room Service is for the most part hack farce, and only as a skillful exhibition of the dodges and makeshifts of show business, a lively conglomeration of classic

Broadway types, can the show build to something better.

Very fitful, in the current Room Service, is the fun spawned of a shoestring producer living on tick with his cast while desperately trying to snag a backer. The whole first act is drearily obstreperous--for one reason because the cast plays straight to the audience, as though the backer could be found in the sixth row center. In the second act, both the play and the playing take on considerably more life. There is some funny pantomime, notably of the producer and two of his associates wolfing their first square meal in days. But there is never the faintest approach to pandemonium; and though the third act is not, like the first, a fiasco, it is run-of-the-mine entertainment.

Not up to being a good joke at Broadway's own expense, Room Service can only fire away as resolutely dizzy farce. But it is not really up to that, either: things are never sufficiently under control to seem to get uproariously out of hand.

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