1940s Archive

After Dinner

Originally Published December 1944

GOURMET has long appreciated and admired Lucius Beebe's impeccancy of taste, and is pleased to present his monthly commentaries on the theatre as a further contribution to the advancement of good living, GOURMET's chosen cause.

The most important play of the season, as this is being written, is beyond any question John Van Druten's I Remember Mama, which is being exhibited at the Music Box, a theatre classic in its implications and strictly carriage trade in overtones. It would be a considerable show in any season, but coming, as it did, at a date when there existed along Broadway a paucity of entertainment of any quality at all, it was hailed with loud if somewhat baffle cries of wonderment and delight by the more astute critics.

The aforementioned bafflement, which, if it did not pervade their invariably omniscient columns, at least appeared in the later barroom colloquies of the reporters, stemmed from a variety of gaudy and altogether amiable confusions inherent in the show itself. It is all very well to retreat into the realm of agreeable generalities when something is presented which includes businesses of frivolity, sentiment, and local color deriving, in essence at least, from such a variety of recent hits as Life with Father, You Can't Take It With You, an Arsenic and Old Lace, and describe the charade as a“folk play.”Mr. Van Druten, however, is too experienced an authentic a play craftsman to assemble a posse of rather delightful eccentrics in period costume merely as a sort of sentimental oleo. He had something in min when he wrote the script of I Remember Mama, but its content largely escape the first-night audience, who were content enough to sniffle wistfully at its sentimentalities and titter delightedly at its turn-of-the-century costumes.

This folk-play business has a formula, readily available and practically sure fire for a shiftless playwright, which Mr. Van Druten certainly is not. Arsenic and Old Lace, it will be recalled, ha its setting in Brooklyn, a circumstance in itself quaint enough to be of almost Gilbert and Sullivan proportions. Life with Father had its being when Sunday dinner at Delmonico's and wrecks on the New Haven were events of startling magnitude in the public imagining. You Can't Take It With You incorporated in its dramatic economy a family of preposterous and utterly irresponsible eccentrics, complete with the most wonderful goon of all time, Mr. De Pinna, who secretly made fireworks in the cellarage. It's damn near impossible to go wrong, theatrically speaking, by assembling at one time and in the frame of a single evening (a) several male members of the cast in braided-edge morning coats, bell-crowned top hats, an parted-in-the-middle hairdos; (b) several female dittos wearing leg o'mutton shirtwaists, chatelaine watches, Gibson- girl coiffures, and button-topped boots; (c) a slightly dishevelled uncle who is the family's most cohesive factor and whose alcoholic outrages eventually fix everything up just dandy; (d) a mechanical archaism such as a 1906 hospital lift or a 1910 Pope-Hartfor roadster; (e) a fussbudget or gossipy character, preferably an aunt, who almost gums up the works at stated intervals.

The aforenamed dramas and numerous others—for example, The American Way—have embodied all these characteristics of sure-fire tugging at the Broadway heartstrings; but none of them has had a cast which included Mady Christians, Oscar Homolka, and Richar Bishop, and none of them was set on Telegraph Hill in San Francisco, a circumstance which, in itself a splendi idea, would automatically award any play, including King Lear played by Vice-President Wallace and a cast of Hottentots, our own Purely Personal Pulitzer Prize.

The evening, technically speaking, belongs to Mady Christians, who, both by the author's intention and by the compelling quality of her own contribution as Mama, gives the play something of cohesion, where, without her either as a character or as a player, it would be almost totally diffused. Her imaginary bank account, her concern for her family's welfare both factually and morally—a concern which verges on the improbable when she resorts to a ruse to visit her daughter in the hospital—and her homely competence are tangible, communicable assets of a theatre evening. Oscar Homolka's boozy and wonderful Uncle Chris, who fixes everything and dies in an interlude of alcoholic sentimentality, is also elegant stuff. Any one imagining I Remember Mama to be a play possessed of the conventional characteristics of motivation, progression, and unity will be disappointed; but he will nevertheless find an evening of rich rewards at the Music Box.

If I Remember Mama is the most important event in New York theatre up to the red-hot moment of this skirmish with the type-setters (there are a number of weighty and delightful footlight essays promised for the immediate future), Bloomer Girl is easily its parallel in the field of complete release and almost purely lyric enterprise. It woul be churlish to say that just as I Remember Mama trails vaguely discernible clouds of glory from antecedent folk dramas, so Bloomer Girl is not without evidence to show that its devisers had, somehow, contrived to hear about Oklahoma! Even in their remote ivory towers, for example, the distinguished John C. Wilson, the producer, and E. Y. Harburg, the co-author-director, had ha tidings of Miss Agnes De Mille; an nobody concerned with the production was ignorant of the fact that period design coupled with musical and lyric archaisms commands a valiant contemporary following. It is notable, too, that Miss Celeste Holm, once of the cast of Oklahoma!, carries the show at the Shubert.

As the scholarly Howard Barnes remarks in the Herald Tribune, Bloomer Girl is no great shakes of a book, but then, neither was Oklahoma! and, anyway, what do you want for $8.80?

As a matter of record, the job accomplished by Miss Holm in every performance of Bloomer Girl is both considerable and exacting. As the rebellious daughter of a good Yankee hoop-skirt fabricator who at once works in the underground railway and conducts a crusade along the early lines of militant feminism, she has a dancing, singing, flirtatious, and clowning assignment which requires a robust constitution an a versatile frame of mind. As is customary in such ornamental shows as Bloomer Girl, the settings, the décor, and the tableaux in Forty-fourth Street are decorative to a degree, and the ballet routines designed by Miss De Mille are what is generally described as“lavish.”Incidentally, the predominance and the success of ballet as an integral part of this show almost right out of the box refute the learned George Jean Nathan, who, in a pre-season forecast of what was to come on Broadway, predicte that ballet would be abated and increasingly unpopular in musical productions.

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