Four of a Kind

With shows opening four nights in a row, the new Broadway season was going strong last week, but the plays were still going sour. The sourest was a short-lived horror, intended as a comedy, called Grandma's Diary. The others:

Magdalena (music by Heitor Villa-Lobos; book by Frederick Hazlitt Brennan & Homer Curran; produced by Mr. Curran) is Broadway's first encounter with Brazil's most famous composer

(TIME, Sept. 27). Unfortunately for Senhor Villa-Lobos, Magdalena seems like its librettists' first encounter with Broadway. They have loaded their book with all the stock melodrama of opera and the seediest monkeyshines of operetta; they have lavished on South America all the tritest features of the tropics and the Balkans. The only thing more incomprehensible than the plot is the notion that any one could follow it. It is a mess of pagan rites, political wrongs, an opera bouffe general (Hugo Haas), vociferous emerald miners, and the love of a bus driver (John Raitt) for a high-born spitfire (Dorothy Sarnoff).

All this is too much for Composer Villa-Lobos, or probably anyone else, to triumph over. It is yet a tribute to him that Magdalena is often something to be enjoyed rather than endured. Some of his music is pleasantly (and all the more pleasantly for being well sung) in the florid, full-bosomed tradition of operetta; while the best of it has real color and wit, is truly folkish or stylish. On the good side, too, are some of Jack Cole's slithery dances, and the genuine if old-fashioned showmanship of Singing Comedienne Irra Petina (Song of Norway).

A Story for Strangers (by Marc Connelly; produced by Dwight Deere Wiman) is told, via flashbacks, to a traveling salesman in a small-town barbershop, and is quite as dull, and ten times as long, as the usual barber's yarn. Subtitled "A Parable," the play is concerned with an undisclosed miracle that has transformed a rascally, coldhearted community into a garden spot of virtue and brotherly love.

Toward the very end, the nature of the miracle is revealed. It turns out to have been a talking horse with a very beautiful and exalted message for the townspeople. The audience neither hears the horse nor sees him; for them, there is only an intense white light above his stall. The horse dies at the end of the play. The play, a kind of Passing of the Third Feedbox Back, died at the end of the week.

Town House (adapted from John Cheever's stories by Gertrude Tonkonogy; produced by Max Gordon) is one more comedy about the housing shortage--and on the whole, one too many. Despite George S. Kaufman's brisk direction and amusing performances by Mary Wickes and Hiram Sherman, it is much oftener forced than funny, and the more the playwrighting falters, the lower the playwright stoops.

The play tells of three glaringly dissimilar couples who decide to share a Manhattan mansion. One couple is incredibly frivolous and snobbish; another is grubby, worthy and naive; both are caricatures, while the third is merely colorless. Never deviating from formula, Town House first shows the couples squabbling with one another, then shows them squabbling among themselves, introduces a snooty mother, a sassy child, and a big shot neighbor who first wishes them all in hell and finally carries them all to heaven.

Ingeniously staged on two levels--living room below, bedrooms above--the play is consistently written at one level: get a laugh at any cost. Actually, if it showed a little more self-respect, it might be considerably more amusing.

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