The Theatre: Harts & Flowers

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After a late and humdrum start, the new season at last unrolled its red carpet and put on a white tie last week. On three successive nights celebrities and sophisticates flocked to welcome their favorite comedy-writing team, their favorite musicomedy-writing team, one of their two favorite actresses.

In The Man Who Came to Dinner (produced by Sam H. Harris), George S. Kaufman & Moss Hart had a smash hit on their hands. Tale of a famous lecturer who goes to a dull dinner-party in an Ohio town, gets hurt, and has to stay on in the house for weeks, the play's wit is as gleamingly cutthroat as its antics are gorgeously custard-pie. The identity of the lecturer is as open a secret as the fact that George Eliot was a woman. Lecturer Sheridan Whiteside (Monty Woolley) is an unexpurgated version of Alexander Woollcott, who has been a friend of the authors' as long as he has been a legend of the literary world. They originally created Sheridan Whiteside as a part for Woollcott. He refused to play it because he had to lecture in real life, but he will probably do so this winter on the road.

In Whiteside, Kaufman & Hart hilariously held the mirror up to ill-nature. Crusty, crotchety, mischiefmaking, selfish, their renowned invalid badgers all comers in epigrammatic Billingsgate. Every combat, to him, is a Blitzkrieg. Now & then, as on Christmas Eve, his gushing soul drips treacle; but the real Whiteside, from his wheelchair throne, commandeers the house, forbids his hosts to use the telephone, tries to smash his secretary's love affair, bewitches the servants, bedevils his nurse. Snaps he to "Miss Bedpan": "My great-aunt Jennifer . . . lived to be 102 and when she was three days dead she looked better than you do now." But the last word is hers: "If Florence Nightingale had nursed you, she would have married Jack the Ripper instead of founding the Red Cross."

The play is rich in more than one kind of name-calling. Before the wheelchair genuflect the world's great. "Gertrude Stein" phones from Paris. "Admiral Byrd" sends penguins, "William Beebe" an octopus. "Harpo Marx" arrives for a cyclonic visit. "Noel Coward" whizzes by, stopping long enough to play a "new song" of his, a howling burlesque all about

. . . the cosmic Ritz

shattered

and scattered

to bits.

Though no stage character but Whiteside has ever made a wheelchair seem so much like a guillotine, Kaufman & Hart have filled their flabbergasted Ohio living-room with more than verbal slaughter, have turned it also into an immensely comic beer garden. While wisecracks pour out of one faucet, nonsense pours out of another. As a comedy of bad manners, The Man Who Came to Dinner turns crude now & then. But with Actor Woolley excellent in the fattest of parts, with most of the jokes buttered on both sides, and with everything from convicts to cockroaches to brighten up the cast, the show is comedy in the best style—all Woollcott and a yard wide.