Stork Club:
A night club with really top-notch food is a rare bird, but Sherman Billingsley's very decorous and well-mannered premises contrive this improbability in an authentically distinguished manner. The Stork's chef, as a matter of fact, is happiest when it is apparent that some really knowing patron upstairs is ordering without benefit of the menu and for the satisfaction of a sophisticated taste. The conventional things such as duckling bigarade, filet béarnaise and shad roe amandine are evolved to perfection and, while the Stork specializes in the sale of spirits rather than wine, there is an adequate champagne list and somehow a good year of Mouton or Lafite always turns up when it is required. Billingsley is a restaurateur at heart and can be seen any night stalking the happy gastronomes at his tables and beaming approval when he knows that authentic amateurs of culinary art are in the house. His stock of cognacs is without exception the finest and most extensive in New York.Since the confection of this department's most recent Broadway bulletin, only two shows have splashed into the ken of theatergoers, but both of them are important and each of them is, in its own particular manner, of outstanding excellence. Their subject matter is somewhat divided since Born Yesterday concerns itself with a big-time Pal Joey who is anxious to take over the world's commerce in postwar junk, while Lute Song is a Chinese classic some five and a half centuries old and, we are assured, the popular equivalent of Ming times of, say Uncle Tom's Cabin. That will give you an idea.
Born Yesterday was evolved by Garson Kanin, its producer, and Paul Douglas, its principal participant, while lying under mounds of steaming towels in the Dawn Patrol, an all-night barber shop in Seventh Avenue, and making notes on the manners and speech of the patrons, most of whom derive from the post-midnight half world of the Times Square district. If Born Yesterday came to assume certain aspects and overtones of John O'Hara's now celebrated Pal Joey, it is only a confirmation of Mr. O'Hara's insight in reporting the world of racketeers and dinner-jacketed mobsters functioning in a post-prohibition national scene.
Opposite Mr. Douglas, who aspires in the play to becoming the junk king of the universe and who buys senators as he buys the favors of love, is Judy Holliday whose part is that of a tough but intelligent hoyden who, once possessed of a little formal book learning and some clues to what life is all about, is able to give the big-time scrapheap man his comeuppance in a manner acceptable both to Broadway cynics and more moral observers of contemporary ways.
Born Yesterday is rough, tough, and trashy, as befits its theme, and its humors are eminently those of the West Forties and The Loop as befit its subject matter. It flags and flutters only when its authors allow moral indignation to rear its boring head which isn't very often, thank God.
Lute Song, as has already been established by the play reporters, is the kind of show that either leaves the beholder entirely cold or fills him with such a crusading enthusiasm that he is tempted to hire space in the public prints, at his own expense, to advertise its charms and wonders. It is, as its adapters, Will Irwin and Sidney Howard, are the first to admit, an elaborate and fanciful Chinese ballet stemming originally from the fifteenth century folk theater, in which speech, action, and songs are the merest incidental to ritual, pageantry, and symbolism.
Mary Martin is assigned a part of lyrical eloquence and, through all the ceremonial conventions which hedge the play and lend it a curious and satisfying tranquility, she contrives to live up to the almost rapturous advance notices she received along Broadway during its Boston tryout. Mike Meyerberg, proprietor of Lute Song, is reported to have invested ＄150,000 in its settings, costumes, and properties, and this is readily understandable since it is one of the most glamorously furnished shows of the current season and is characterized by parades, ceremonials, and processionals in every other scene. To this reporter, at least, Lute Song was a charming and eye-filling evening in the theater and something quite out of his previous experience. It should be doing business, despite various critical yahoos, even when this is printed.
Pinterest
