New Shows in Manhattan

Comedy in Music is simply Victor Borge, and his one-man show is Broadway's best show so far this season. To a Broadway glutted with solo flights--half of them spills to boot--Borge is almost able to demonstrate that, in terms of entertainers, two's a crowd and even a stooge is a superfluity. Long a success in nightclubs and TV, he fits perfectly into the theater. No more a routine comic than a straight pianist, he has the superb showmanship that can hold audiences by doing anything--or nothing.

There is thus, to begin with, the sense of a suave M.C. who is continually introducing what turns out to be himself. The self is sometimes a zany who chatters away--in a manner that eludes cold print --about one relative who invented a cure for which there is no disease, and about another who crossed the Idaho potato with a sponge--the result hardly tastes very good, but "it can hold an awful lot of gravy." The self is oftener an accomplished pianist who mutters as he plays and often denounces what he is playing, who performs all the roles in a Mozart opera, or .offers Happy Birthday to You in every style from Bach's to Irving Berlin's.

Like most patter merchants, Danish-born Victor Borge sometimes indulges in very corny gags and in rather too-cute remarks. There are even moments when he does nothing more than play the piano agreeably. But with his full kit of comedy tools, he not only blends words and music, but mixes satire with nonsense, the irrelevant with the irreverent. And if what he does begins to pall a little, there is still a genuine fascination in how he does it.

Tea and Sympathy (by Robert Anderson) is effective theater, which expresses both its lure and its limitations. Over a peculiarly topical theme of horror--a prepschool boy falsely accused of homosexuality--Playwright Anderson has draped one of the most steadfastly serviceable of methods. Everything in Tea and Sympathy is very much the stuff, and even the sobstuff, of good matinee drama; and Elia Kazan has staged the play with a lively sense of his opportunities.

Seventeen-year-old Tom Lee is a quiet, sensitive "off horse" at a particularly muscular and conformist school; he lives, furthermore, under the roof of a particularly harsh and he-man housemaster. From a little acorn of gossip an ugly scandal soon spreads its entangling branches, with Tom defended only by his housemaster's beautiful, equally off-horse wife. Trying desperately to prove his normality by dating the town tramp, Tom only leaves it further in doubt; and it is the housemaster's wife herself, who at the florid final curtain, prepares to make a man of him.

The play has most force not for what Tom is branded with, but in portraying those who use the branding iron, in picturing a cruelly thoughtless pack in full cry after its quarry. If, despite being well told, the story seems factitious, it is less a matter of plausibility--Tea and Sympathy is far more "plausible" than, say, Othello--than of squeezing in as many sentimental and sensational elements as possible. This applies even to motivations, as with the lurking homosexuality in the blatantly masculine housemaster. At times it becomes as hard to imagine how popular drama ever got along without Freud as how routine farce ever did without the telephone.

As Tom, John Kerr (Bernardine) enhances a nicely written role with sure, quiet acting. In the foggier role of the housemaster's wife, Cinemactress Deborah Kerr (no relation) is very radiant, but a little wooden. Theatrically, Kazan's direction is everywhere successful; yet it exploits its material as often as it expresses it; goes arm in arm with the script where it might better lead the way.

The Strong Are Lonely (adapted by Eva Le Gallienne from Fritz Hochwalder's play), dealing far too statuesquely with an impressive theme, closed at week's end. The play told of the difficulties encountered by 18th century Jesuits who created a kind of Utopia in Paraguay. Spain, whose sovereignty they menaced, the Jesuits could defy; but when their own superiors (fearful of what might happen to the order as a whole) commanded them to submit, they faced a bitter ordeal.

In this play, as in Shaw's Saint Joan, a great religious institution sets worldly aims against spiritual ones, and renews--in very human terms--one of mankind's great moral debates. But here, unfortunately, the whole thing was handled in the style of an old-fashioned debating society. Everyone struck attitudes, the simplest idea seemed clad in armor, there was something too declamatory for talk, yet too stiff for eloquence. High-minded and literate, the play came off a stately bore.

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