Anytime some learned editorialist laments, or mannerless oaf hails, the passing of the man-about-town, Father Knickerbocker or Eustace Tilley, as the case may be, can afford a laugh up the sleeve of his newest Tony Williams tail-coat. Some vintages are better than others, but there's always a new generation of boulevard characters just around the corner.
The most determined and uncompromising stand yet registered against inflation has been reported to this department by a Boston correspondent who, just to show the type of agent we employ, is available to the cloistered precincts of the Boston Athenaeum. Three-cent tea has always been institutional in America's most stately private library, but to confirm and strengthen the Athenaeum's stand in times of crisis, there has been recently printed a menu for the tea hour on Beacon Hill, which reads: “Cup of Tea: three cents; Cup of Tea with Plain Biscuit: four cents; Cup of Tea with Plain Biscuit and Sweet Biscuit: five cents; Cup of Tea with Two Sweet Biscuits: six cents.” Beyond this Babylonish license it is evident that even the most profligate imagination of the Athenaeum hesitates to venture, and it's obvious that for a dime Belshazzar would have gone hog-wild among the files of The Atlantic Monthly.
In addition to the ordinary recommendations of the Plaza as a residence when in Manhattan, it is possessed of a specific fascination for Nunnally Johnson, Daryl Zanuck's ranking vicar, because of the elfin quality of the mail clerk. One morning recently the great man paused at the desk to inquire if he had any mail. “Well, Mr. Johnson,” said the young lady brightly, “temporarily, no!”
Quite aside from a good revival of Pal Joey, which was the best stage entertainment Broadway has seen in the last decade and could well be reproduced to the profit and pleasure of everyone concerned, what the theater needs most at the moment of the penning of these deathless strophes is some sort of mean or sense of balance which will give the reviewers an opportunity of avoiding the critical excesses to which they have been driven by the current season.
No matter if a play-reviewer be as objective and secure in his knowledge of excellence and its reverse as Wolcott Gibbs, and very few are, it is impossible for him not to react in a more or less uncritical manner to such a prolonged bout with mediocrity and down-right bathos as has been required of every aisle-seat practitioner during the past fall and winter. Probably no single show of the season elicited universal critical applause with the sole exception of Joan of Lorraine, a charade in which a bovine and expressionless actress named Bergman pushes virginal nobility and sacrifice around the stage in quantities too strong for the stomach of anybody but reviewers, a race who are under stern compulsion to applaud virginity and nobility on any terms even if they are exploited in a manner that would make a top hat look plausible on an Ojibway.
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