There were until just before the war, and may well still be, old-timers around Gilpin County who remember Central City long before anyone ever thought it would become, perhaps in partnership with Nevada's Virginia City, America's most celebrated “ghost town.” Mayor John Jenkins, who is no graybeard, still keeps a set of gold scales in his cast-iron safe and a supply of fuse and blasting caps behind the cannon ball stove in Jenkins' Hardware Store. A minstrel who turns up now and then under the name of “Powder River Jack” is said by students of the internal evidences of his ballads to be an authentic sourdough. Billy Hamilton, caretaker of the Opera House, was caretaker before the turn of the century. The past and only yesterday are just around the corner from Williams' Livery Stables and they can be and are once a year invoked by the fiddles in the musicians' gallery of the Teller House playing “Oh, Susannah” and “Clementine,” and the voice of Dr. Louis Shaw, the dancing master, calling “Choose your partners!”
On Broadway the theater season went into its last lap before the accustomed summer slackening of tempo with one of the few resounding surprises of the year and this time one which had to be inscribed on the debit side of the ledger. Woman Bites Dog had in prospect every earmark of a hit of smash proportions. Out-of-town notices were good; its subject, dealing as it did with a dynasty of American newspaper publishers known for their patriotic zeal and humorous personal characteristics, seemed propitious, its authors, Sam and Bella Spewack, are noted for their capacity to inflame audiences to hysteria with such comedy as that of Boy Meets Girl. But Woman Bites Dog, for all its moments of superb slapstick and others of vitriolic ridicule of pretentions in high places, got only a mixed bag of reviews and closed three nights after it had opened. Nobody but the management quite knew why, and the reporters who were less than enthusiastic about its possibilities could be discovered, at Jack and Charlie's, wondering very quietly among themselves if perhaps they hadn't done to death an innocent bit of merriment which might have prospered had they given it encouragement.
The front which the drama reporters of the moment present again against a frankly suspicious public is neither unified nor particularly literate, and the better informed in their numbers are more than usually sensitive of criticism and anxious to avoid controversy. Their ranks shorn by the mutations of time of the urbanity of Brooks Atkinson, the murderous wit of Percy Hammond, and the scholarship of John Mason Brown, it has been remarked by Wolcott Gibbs that there are not three first-raters in the aisle seats today, and less charitable folk incline to believe that he was extraordinarily liberal in his count. There is a school of thought which holds that Mr. Gibbs himself alone combines sound taste, background, and an urbane ferocity in the proportions which make for top-drawer dramatic criticism and that only his own modesty inclined him to include, at the least, two other drama critics in his catalogue of virtues.
The spring show which, to the date this goes to the print shop, aroused almost universal acclaim despite some very weak moments indeed was a revue written by Harold Rome and produced by Melvyn Douglas under the title Call Me Mister, which dealt with the rediscovered delights of civilian civilization by members of the armed service. Atoning for slack and witless interludes by the almost excessive vitality of its performance and some entirely enchanting satire such as its heavenly burlesque of the rhumba, “South America, Take It Away,” Call Me Mister is reasonably sure to be available for some time to come. It avoids by a wide margin the possible bitterness which could impregnate any show devised and portrayed by an all-ex-service cast and yet contrives to embrace a great deal of valid satire and robust wit.
For its cast, the revue has distinct assets in Betty Garrett and a superb comic previously unknown to this department—Jules Minshin—who can even do a parody of Maurice Evans, which is by way of being a lily-painting achievement if ever there were one. A few weak and ineffectual sketches and songs are completely overwhelmed by such hilarious moments as the year's funniest ten minutes on any stage called “Off We Go” and an all-time job on the Noel Coward comedy heroics of a gilded group of the A.A.F.
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