New Show in Manhattan

All in One adds up to a sort of higher vaudeville--a short Leonard Bernstein opera, a short Tennessee Williams play, and Dancer Paul Draper. Nothing on the bill was fresh-minted for the occasion. Indeed, Williams' 27 Wagons Full of Cotton is eleven years old; and occasion is hardly the right word for the whole evening. But, helped by some talented performing, All in One is pleasantly unusual and varied.

Composer Bernstein's Trouble in Tahiti (TIME, June 23, 1952) twangs the rather snarled relations of a bored suburban couple. In its breakfast-table and business-day vignettes, it takes on some of the flatness of its subject matter. But its mockingbird passages--as when a trio hymns the joys of Scarsdale or Shaker Heights--are brighter, and it gets very bright and funny when Singer Alice Ghostley, while meaning to sneer at the movie she's seen, rhapsodically pants over it.

27 Wagons Full of Cotton reveals that for Tennessee Williams, life had dirty fingernails from the outset. Williams tells of a mussy, lolling, almost half-witted young girl married to a much older, hard-up cotton man who has set fire to a rival cotton gin. As he hoped, he gets the order to process his rival's cotton, but the rival supervisor, as hush money, beds the wife. The plot is rowdy Erskine Caldwell with a crueler edge: already, eleven years ago, Williams could make a smoking-car story constitute a criticism of life. Tremendously helpful to 27 Wagons is Maureen Stapleton's brilliantly funny and disturbingly lifelike portrait of the wife.

Between percussioned boredom in the suburbs and rural depravity in the South, All in One offers Paul Draper's clean and stylish tap dancing. Draper seems to have grown more versatile, particularly on the satiric side; but what remains uniquely his is the tapping to classical themes, the suggestion of ballet grace.

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