Aside from the good, the beautiful, and the cowlike Miss Bergman, no single player, let alone a single play, has claimed the wholehearted enthusiasm of all the reporters at once, and, by and large, they have been dragooned by the stage parade of mediocrity into devices of self-justification somewhat removed from the judicious use of their critical faculties. Brooks Atkinson, for example, newly returned to the Times, has simply said the hell with it, and in sheer desperation reported every successive production as something fantastically wonderful, in much the manner that Hearst employees used to greet the professional screen appearances of Miss Marion Davies. Simply, it seemed easier that way.
In the reverse direction Howard Barnes of the Herald Tribune has decided the hell with it and everything is terribly awful, so that he couldn't even have a good time at The Big Two, parts of which almost everyone else seemed to enjoy. Most people thought parts of Finian's Rainbow were justified, but a willingness to be sold on this particular song-and-dance fantasy was pretty well overcome by its insistence on socio-political allusions, a technique more honored this season in the breach than in the observance. What an outsider may gather about Broadway depends almost entirely on which paper he reads, and critical coherence is at a universal discount. So far as this department is concerned, The Big Two was about the only recent play which persuaded him that there still was life in the theater and that a seat in the Adelphi was even remotely preferable to home and bed on a cold night.
To begin with, The Big Two has a top-drawer company; it has an actual script with an idea by the very sophisticated Ladislaus Bush-Fekete, who always sounds like a character from one of his own comedies; and it is directed, produced, and performed in the obvious belief that the audience should have a lot of laughs, a little straight romance, and a deluge of atmosphere for its money. In fact, The Big Two is so long on atmosphere that a great deal of its progress is accomplished in Russian, German, and an assortment of unidentifiable European dialects, the recognition and possible translation of which are always gratifying to informed minorities in the house and which don't particularly impede the play's progress for anyone not a Berlitz graduate.
Against a setting of Russian-occupied Austria, Mr. Bush-Fekete has arranged an encounter between an American lady-correspondent (almost a must in any theater production these days) and a stern Russian militarist, with Claire Trevor and Philip Dorn in the leading polylingual parts and with a lot of old-time lush Mittel-Europa background and the incomparable acting of a large posse of wonderful bit players. Somehow Elliott Nugent and Robert Montgomery have contrived to bring back a touch of the theater to the stage, a trick almost incomparably infrequent at the current writing.
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