O!d Playlets in Manhattan

Tonight at 8:30 (by Noel Coward; produced by Homer Curran, Russell Lewis & Howard Young) ran to three evenings of three playlets each when Noel Coward and Gertrude Lawrence were co-starred in them in 1936. This time Tonight at 8:30 offers one session and one star the less: three playlets and Noel Coward have dropped out of the show.

And after twelve years the bottom has dropped out of it too. Or at any rate out of last week's half--Ways and Means, Family Album, Red Peppers (this week: Hands Across the Sea, Fumed Oak, Shadow Play). Ways and Means, telling about a stony-broke but determinedly gay couple visiting in a stylish Riviera villa, and Family Album, in which a Victorian family drink themselves out of mourning Papa's death into welcoming it, had always seemed pretty trivial. But last week they also seemed pretty trashy, and not much fun. Only Red Peppers, an onstage-backstage-onstage chronicle of a pair of bickering, third-rate British hoofers, retained any real life or laughter.

What Playwright Coward misses most in the current version is Actor Coward. The Coward-Lawrence stage teamwork had constituted a talent in itself. This time Actress Lawrence's agility only emphasizes British Actor Graham Payn's lack of it.

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