New Plays in Manhattan

The Fabulous Invalid (by Moss Hart & George S. Kaufman; produced by Sam H. Harris) is picture-postcard history of the U. S. theatre, as Noel Coward's Cavalcade was of modern Britain. For framework, Playwrights Kaufman & Hart have told the story of a particular Manhattan playhouse called the Alexandria Theatre, and for theme they have shown that the theatre, a fabulous invalid frequently on the point of dying, somehow never quite dies.

The curtain of the new, resplendent Alexandria (see cut) first goes up in an age of hansom cabs, and the theatre's great days give the authors a chance to bring back scenes from a host of famous shows, from The Easiest Way and The Pink Lady to What Price Glory? and The Vortex. Every so often the pageant is halted because the theatre is rumored dead of various causes: Roosevelt I, the automobile, the war-tax, the movies, the radio, Roosevelt II.

The theatre in general muddles through, but the Alexandria sinks into a coma. First it turns into a movie house (see cut) featuring Screeno night. Then it stoops to burlesque, complete with striptease. Then the police raid it, board it up, leave it grimy and forgotten. At the end the fabulous invalid is once more sitting up in bed: a band of young hopefuls, led by someone who might be Orson Welles, sweep out the dust and start rehearsing.

Kaufman & Hart's idea of a theatrical Remembrance of Things Past was bright: even the hard-boiled feel tender toward the theatre of their youth. But the adroit humorists of Once in a Lifetime and You Can't Take It With You hopelessly lost their way on such a sentimental journey.

They have a young actor and actress die backstage on the first night of the Alexandria's career, and thereafter these two --along with another dead actor--appear as ghosts, whisper from the wings, declaim before the footlights, bob up in boxes, feverishly exhorting the theatre --their theatre--not to die. In Act I this disembodied trio communes with Shakespeare, in Act II with God.

This maudlin hocuspocus, together with far too much stunting and propagandizing, slows down the tempo of the show to a very ordinary invalid's walk. If the fabulous invalid survives, it will be thanks more to its own constitution than to the ministrations of Broadway's highest-paid, by-appointment-only play doctors.

The Devil Takes a Bride (by Joe Bates Smith; produced by Montgomery Ford) makes the Brooklyn of 1876 a pretty sinister spot. A young Brooklyn lady is kept virtually a prisoner by a father who is a cross between Mr. Barrett of Wimpole Street and Elsie Dinsmore's papa. But just as the audience's heart begins to bleed for the lass, she herself turns out to be a cross between Lizzie Borden and Lady Macbeth, orders her suitor to kill the old man. When he accidentally kills somebody else, she calmly gets father hanged for the murder.

After that, the suitor decides he will be better off single.

Heavy, hackneyed, played too slow for melodrama, written too badly for anything else, The Devil Takes a Bride seemed to forget that it was the cast, not the audience, who are supposed to live in 1876.

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