All That Glittered: The Golden Age of Drama on Broadway, 1919-1959 (39 page)

By far, the mistress of star Shakespeare at the time was director Margaret Webster. This formidable talent, daughter of actors Ben Webster and Dame May Whitty (who played Nurse in the Olivier-Leigh
Romeo
), staged New York’s first uncut
Hamlet
(with Maurice Evans, in 1938 and again in 1939), and much of her work was comparably unusual. Not the standard-make
Twelfth Night
(1940) with Helen Hayes’ Viola and Evans as a cockney Malvolio. But an Evans
Macbeth
(1941) brought forth the terrifying Lady of Judith Anderson. “I heard [her] lines as if for the first time,” said George Freedley, and John Mason Brown thought the play finally worked, after 350 years.

Yet more history was made when Webster cast Paul Robeson in
Othello
(1943), with José Ferrer and Uta Hagen. Critics and public alike treated the show as a welcome act of social promotion, but George Jean Nathan, reviewing the performance rather than the event, thought Robeson “a Walter Hampden in blackface, overly rhetorical, monotonous, rigid, and given to barely concealed consciousness of its vocal organ tones.” Recordings of scenes defend Nathan’s view, though black Canada Lee proved a very lively Caliban in a Webster staging of
The Tempest
in 1945. (Further reinstructing the casting of Elizabethan drama, Lee played Bosola, in whiteface, in
The Duchess of Malfi
a year later.) Webster’s
Tempest
was generally creative in its “speaking” of Shakespeare, giving Ariel to the dancer Vera Zorina and Trinculo and Stephano to Czech comics. Interestingly, this favorite of Shakespeare’s late romances was then a rarity on Broadway. Louis Kronenberger could recall no revival after 1916, though Robert Garland mentioned a forgotten repertory troupe that gave
The Tempest
and fourteen other Shakespeare titles in a single unit set at the Jolson for half the 1932–33 season.

The Webster
Tempest
was one of Cheryl Crawford’s better guesses as a producer, and the staging concept was apparently dreamed up by Eva Le Gallienne. The plan called for a permanent structure resembling an island somewhere in ancient Greece, ever revolving to keep the action fluid in the new forties Broadway timing that sought, finally, to eradicate the stage waits so common to set changes in the past. The entire play was broken into halves separated by an intermission; whatever else one could say, the evening
moved
. The critics carped, but the show was a cognoscente’s highlight and ran 100 performances, still the demarcation line marking hit from flop.

Let us close out this Shakespearean sequence with Maurice Evans’ so-called G.I.
Hamlet
in 1945, a shortened version that he had toured to servicemen at the front. This, too, just got to the 100-performance mark, even at that old white elephant on Columbus Circle that had opened (in 1903) as the Majestic with
The Wizard of Oz
and then gone into eclipse as the Park, Minsky’s Park Music Hall, the Cosmopolitan, and the International, among other names. It was the Columbus Circle Theatre for Evans’
Hamlet,
the last good booking it hosted till it was pulled down in 1954. The original entrance was about fifteen feet southeast of the front doorway into the present-day shopping complex containing Whole Foods.

One notable aspect of forties theatregoing is the ease with which comedy hits racked up those big runs we’ve been remarking on. Jerome Chodorov and Joseph Fields’
Junior Miss
(1941) is typical: a capable bit of nothing on the generation war that lasted 710 performances. As in the musical
Best Foot Forward
that same year, the cast seemed to consist exclusively of teens and forty-somethings, as the kids frazzle the grown-ups, and the audiencec recalls its own scrapes and punishments. The source was a series of
New Yorker
stories, long a fruitful garden for plays, from
My Sister Eileen
and
Life With Father
to two shows we haven’t mentioned,
Having Wonderful Time
(1937) and
Mr. and Mrs. North
(1941), along with the musicals
Pal Joey
(1940) and
The Education of H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N
(1968).

Junior Miss
is another of those “comedies” that scarcely ever utters a geuinely funny line. It’s an amusing show, not a witty one. The plot generators are protagonist Judy (Patricia Peardon) and sidekick Fuffy (Lenore Lonergan), who for no good reasons decide that Judy’s father is cheating on her mother and Judy’s uncle is a felon. The two girls were official Broadway discoveries. Richard Watts thought Peardon “just gawky enough, just blooming enough, and just pretty enough.” In short: “completely darling.” Louis Kronenberger called Lonergan “easier … to praise than to describe,” probably because of her gaudily gritty vocal tone. Although the critics noted how silly the story was, they were enthusiastic about how well Chodorov and Fields caught the fads and follies of American youth. Burns Mantle thought
Junior Miss
“a successor to the Tarkington tradition,” and specified his appreciation with “Penrod and the Baby Talk Lady are with us again.”
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Substitute for the sidekick figure an irritating younger sister—“Once I grew four inches in a week,” she boasts—and the
Junior Miss
formula yields
Janie
(1942), which totted up a nearly comparable 642-showing run. Unlike
Junior Miss, Janie
included uniforms; by 1942, servicemen were all but de rigueur in comedy. Again, there were plenty of huge runs:
Kiss and Tell
(1943) played for 957 performances,
The Voice of the Turtle
(1943) for 1,557, and
Dear Ruth
(1944) for 683.

Kiss and Tell
was a domestic comedy and
The Voice of the Turtle
a one-set, three-character talk piece. But
Dear Ruth
’s author, Norman Krasna, had thought of a genuine comic premise: a teenager (Lenore Lonergan, still in a secondary role) has been writing to a lieutenant in the Air Force overseas in her sister Ruth’s name, having sent him her sister’s photograph. On leave, the soldier shows up on Ruth’s wedding day—so of course Ruth (Virginia Gilmore) falls in love with the soldier (John Dall). Krasna even thought of a classic comic finish, and we imagine that director Moss Hart made the most of it. After the girls’ judge father gives the new couple a quickie marriage, the pair run off to finish Dall’s leave as their honeymoon. All is calm. Now for the storm: another enlisted man turns up at the door, this one a sailor. He asks for Ruth.

LONERGAN:
(in a spasm of remembrance) Harold!

Harold Klobbermeyer!

So Lonergan’s been a busy little correspondent; and the curtain is already coming down.

Far from all these very “wartime” comedies was a New York in-joke of a piece, H. S. Kraft’s
Café Crown
(1942). Elia Kazan’s first directing job after his Group days,
Café Crown
was an à clef show about—I think astonishingly—the Yiddish theatre scene. It’s astonishing because how many Broadway habitués would recognize in the titular setting the Café Royal, where Second Avenue nobility held court? Would they recognize in the protagonist (Morris Carnovsky) the patriarchal actor-manager Jacob Adler, father of the Group’s Stella and Luther? Yet
Café Crown
ran 141 performances, mainly on the fun that Kraft had with the mores of this subcultural show biz in which stars routinely speak of their “latest farewell appearance” and in which
Rain
is reset in the Catskills with a Rabbi Davidson as the heavy. Richard Watts Jr. found
Café Crown
“mellow and engaging,” but it sounds quirky rather than mellow, as a critic quietly writes his notice of Carnovsky’s King Lear (opposite a Mrs. Lear) before he has seen it, or as a composer writes “The Last Time I Saw Poland.”
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One of the era’s funniest comedies was, as one might expect, a Kaufman-Hart show—their last together, in fact—
George Washington Slept Here
(1940). Following the fortunes of city folk fixing up a dilapidated country place, it lacks
You Can’t Take It With You
’s ecumenism and
The Man Who Came To Dinner
’s celebrity exposé. It also suffers from the worst and even the meanest ending of any comedy from so prominent an atelier; and I’ll get to that presently.

The play’s central leads, the Fullers, make an odd couple, for he (Ernest Truex) is small and fumbly while she (Jean Dixon, an alumna of the first Kaufman-Hart show,
Once in a Lifetime
) is big and in charge. The colorful types filling out the rural Pennsylvania scene include the rustic (Percy Kilbride, one of the last practitioners of the Lightnin’ Bill Jones shtick and Marjorie Main’s future partner in the
Ma and Pa Kettle
film series), the vicious neighbor, the evil nephew, the parasitical rich uncle (Dudley Digges, later O’Neill’s Harry Hope), an actor couple, an uncooperative black cook, and the dating teens so much a part of Broadway at this time. Most of the really good lines are Jean Dixon’s, as her dry delivery brought out that salient wisecrack quality of the powerless seeking power. She is sensible in a senseless world—in, basically, a dream of a country place that is a nightmare of impediments and despairs. The house doesn’t even have running water:

THE RUSTIC:
We’ve drilled down four hundred and twenty feet, and what do you think? We just struck mud.

MR. FULLER:
Mud?

…

MRS. FULLER:
Oh, I think it’s wonderful, Newton. Those hot nights in August, when I say to Katie—Katie, make us a big pitcher of iced mud, will you?

THE RUSTIC:
And then there’s the trees, Mr. Fuller. We ought to start doing something about the trees pretty soon.

MRS. FULLER:
What do we have to do about the trees, Mr. Kimber? Pay them for standing here?

Eventually, the family restores the house and conquers all adversity—and just then the vicious neighbor turns it all around. The people we have grown to love are to lose all they worked for: all the labor that we, too, feel a part of. It is genuinely calamitous, and we are unnerved when they get drunk and set about utterly wrecking their house so the vicious neighbor can’t enjoy it. So, when a last-minute ruse turns it all around again and the family regains their home and a storm breaks out and the rain pours in for the frantic final curtain, we become resentful. This is not the here-we-go-again! curtain of
Dear Ruth,
but something unhappy and even offensive.
Dear Ruth
is a slice of escapist cake;
George Washington Slept Here
has an emotional reality. In some strange way, this month in the country (actually a spring-summer) rejuvenates the Fullers and draws them closer together. It’s a gagfest, yes, but a lovable one—until the wrecking of the house. According to the Kaufman estate—namely, Anne Kaufman [Kiss of the] Schneider [Woman]—whenever the play is performed, the audience has a ball till the wrecking scene, and the evening ends in a resistant chill.

Serious drama was not in fettle in the early 1940s. Not only did comedy outperform it commercially, but O’Neill was not heard from at all, his prominent colleagues were in temporary or permanent decline, and the new set of Williams-Miller-Inge was not yet in play in any real sense.

Most of the interesting titles were the work of unknowns—for instance, Philip Yordan’s
Anna Lucasta
(1944). Yordan told an oddly comic tale of a sort of Polish-American Anna Christie. Failing to interest a producer, Yordan ended up giving the script to the American Negro Theatre, turning it into a black story simply by changing the setting and some of the names. Perhaps this was why the
World-Telegram
’s Burton Rascoe praised the show as universal rather than ethnic; he compared the performance to “the finest efforts of the Moscow Art Theatre.” Everyone agreed that it was less the story than the lively secondary characters that kept
Anna Lucasta
spirited. Louis Kronenberger compared it to Elizabethan drama and
Carmen
.

All this enthusiasm for a piece playing four nights a week during a summer heat wave in a basement seating two hundred on collapsible wooden chairs! Nevertheless, money notices and Broadway buzz demanded that the show move to The Street, and its leads of Hilda Moses Simms, Earle Hyman, and Frederick O’Neal were joined by Canada Lee at the Mansfield (today the Brooks Atkinson) in a revision and an entirely new production. The critics were less enthusiastic now; a more commercial approach with a tacked-on happy ending made a black experiment just another Broadway show with a black cast. Still, a run of 957 performances made
Anna Lucasta
the most successful black title of the age.

The more serious—indeed violent—
Native Son
(1941), by Paul Green and Richard Wright, from Wright’s novel, was the age’s succès d’estime, giving Canada Lee the opportunity of his career as Bigger Thomas, defiantly racist in his attitude toward whites and, in Orson Welles’ slash-and-burn staging, a figure of appalling grandeur. The show’s 97 performances makes a fine showing for so uncompromising a piece, played in an at the time extremely rare single act. Still, ten years after
Anna Lucasta
had closed, E. Y. Harburg could slip the title into a lyric in the Lena Horne musical
Jamaica
confident that his audience would place it;
Native Son
would have meant next to nothing by then. We should note as well that this was when Hilda Simms (who had dropped her middle name), hailed as a terrific find as Anna, was reduced to playing a maid in the comedy
King of Hearts
(1954) simply because there was so little work for non-singing blacks on Broadway.

Balancing the black show, let’s try a white folk play:
Dark of the Moon
(1945), “a legend with music.” This one’s really white, the work of two twenty-something cousins who were nephews of the aforementioned
Clansman
author Thomas Dixon. Supposedly, there are countless versions of the folk ballad “Barbara Allen,” and the cousins, Howard Richardson and William Berney, took as their plot premise the version that goes: