Hollywood Hotfoot

By T. E. K.

BOY MEETS GIRL by BELLA and SAM SPEWACK

P.T. Barnum never died; he went to Hollywood. That was Broadway's view around 1935 when Boy Meets Girl was first presented in New York. Almost annually in those years, Shubert Alley applied a farcical hotfoot to the inane denizens of Celluloid City.

The show is still furiously funny, not because the setting is Hollywood but be cause the subjects are avarice, folly and desire, three aspects of human nature that make the whole world kin. The two protagonists, Robert Law (Lenny Baker) and J. Carlyle Benson (Charles Kimbrough), are nuthouse intellectuals--that is to say, screenwriters. Playwrights Bella and Sam Spewack modeled them on the famed '20s collaborators Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur. Their problem is to put together a film vehicle for a narcissistic cowboy star whose IQ is perceptibly lower than that of his horse.

A commissary waitress, Susie (Mary beth Hurt), who has granted her favors to some married bounder and is, as she puts it, "a little bit pregnant," provides the writing duo with an inspiration. They will pair her soon-to-be-born child with the roughrider of the purple sage and tug at the nation's heartstrings.

They do, but there are rib-splitting complications involving studio moguls, frenetic decomposers of music and lyrics, and the amorous son of a British lord.

The cast's spirited foolery inoculates the evening with laughter, and John Lithgow's pell-mell direction would probably secure a friendly salute from the dean of comic mayhem, George Abbott, now 88, who directed Boy Meets Girl the first time, 41 years ago.

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