Theater: Unpalatable

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Dinner at Eight has cooled. No line in this 34-year-old George S. Kaufman-Edna Ferber comedy is more than tepidly amusing. What with social changes and altered tastes, a faint, distant aroma of the '30s clings to the play—and astonishingly little else.

The comedy has been exhumed, but it resists revival. In that bygone era of playmaking, there was a vogue for entangling a group of unrelated characters on the crossed-up switchboard of life, whether in a hotel (Grand Hotel), or an ocean liner (Outward Bound), or a theatrical club full of struggling ingenues (Stage Door). This Dinner party is being given for a pair of British nabobs, Lord and Lady Ferncliffe—themselves archaic forms of snobbism —who do not show up. The host is Walter Pidgeon, who suffers from past heartburns (Arlene Francis), present heart seizures and a failing family shipping line. The guests include an uncouth Montana mining shark (Robert Burr) who is secretly buying up the shipping line and is himself being two-timed by his wife, Pamela Tiffin, a diaphanous parody of Jean Harlow, who plays with her doctor (Jeffrey Lynn). The hostess (June Havoc) is in a canary-twittering dither because she has lost her lobster aspic in a scuffle of criminal passion between the butler and the chauffeur over the upstairs maid. The omnipresence of servants gives the play the air of a planet quite unlike Earth.

There are eight scenes in the first two acts, and one of life's little ironies drops like a shoe with each curtain, but Director Tyrone Guthrie's slavish devotion to Kaufman and Ferber's studied contrivances robs the Dinner of all relish before it is served.

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