The Tiger & the Lady

To wild applause, a shaggy, prune-faced man lunges onstage at Manhattan's Bijou Theater, his skinny torso masked by a loose red sweater, his hands feverishly clutching a rolled-up newspaper. Then Monologuist Mort Sahl, 30, star of The Next President, tigerishly launches into his act. He runs on and on and on, a Beat-Generation Cotton Mather who gives half the names in the news a beating, cracking his whip up Pennsylvania Avenue one minute, down Madison Avenue the next. Ostentatiously irreverent, he is at times witty, oftener merely outspoken.

In offbeat nightclubs and twice a week on NBC Radio's Nightline (Tues. and Thurs. 9:10 p.m., E.S.T.), Comic Sahl has been convulsing audiences with his chip-on-shoulder, seemingly ad-libbed yuks. Not everyone has been convulsed. A bitter, nervous type, Sahl talked himself right out of two TV contracts by tactlessly placed sallies, offended network brass by opening one NBC spot with: "Well, kids, if we're good today, General Sarnoff might like us, and if he likes us he'll go to Charles Van Doren and get us more money."

But the Sahl legend continues to grow. Often mercilessly abusive ("I see where J. Edgar Hoover has written a book. I think it's called How to Turn In Your Friends to the FBI for Fun and Profit"), sometimes sharply on target ("The reissue title of this paperback book is Here Is My Flesh, which originally appeared as An Introduction to Accounting"), Sahl flays both political left and right, freewheels through a labyrinth of rambling asides to his punch lines.

Son of a frustrated playwright, Sahl joined the Army at 17 ("I was so close to MacArthur I got radiation burns"), majored in public administration at the University of Southern California, later worked up to S.R.O appearances at nightspots in San Francisco and New York.

In a Broadway theater grown intellectually a little stuffy, Sahl is a kind of nice fresh breath of carbon monoxide. Beyond talking miles too long (he should never stray beyond nightclub limits), his current great faults are too much smugness and too little showmanship. He could be more outrageous if he were less obviously pleased with his manner and his mission, if he did not wait for laughs and even join in them. The danger with anybody as much commentator as jokester is that the mocking will become the messianic; already there is an atmosphere in the audience of followers rather than fans.

Less than two blocks from Sahl's Broadway debut, England's Joyce Grenfell, a gaily chirping mockingbird, was back, after 2 1/2 years, with her monologues and songs. After a travesty on Opening Numbers, she imitates a Stately Homeowner on TV, lady choristers at the Albert Hall, assorted cockneys and Yankees, a harebrained cultist and a cheery nursery-school teacher. Mimic Grenfell's satiric range is narrow, her lunges make mere surface wounds, and half a Grenfell loaf is better than all of one. But her art, if thin, is pure, and it is an art--one that flowered most richly with the late Ruth Draper. To call Joyce Grenfell a superior Draper's assistant is not faint praise.

A nerveless ("I never get stage fright") old pro, London-born* Joyce Grenfell, 48, stumbled onstage by accident in 1939 as a sideline to a happy career as wife (to Mine Director Reginald Grenfell), a radio critic for the Observer, and sometime writer for Punch. She was dragooned into a London revue after a party performance. She later collaborated with Wit Stephen (Gamesmanship) Potter on BBC comedies, by 1955 had played outstanding bits in movies (Genevieve, The Belles of St. Trinian's) and her first solo revue in London.

Satirist Grenfell gathers material for her all-too-humans from observation: "But I'm really not conscious of observing people any more. I think I did it all years ago and just stored up. My characters are all composites. I never set out to be beastly. There's a little bit of me in all of my characterizations."

* Her mother, a sister of Lady Astor and the late Mrs. Charles Dana Gibson, was one of the five beautiful Langhorne sisters of Virginia.

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