The 50s

by The New Yorker Magazine

  MARCH 24, 1956 (ON MY FAIR LADY)

  UST ABOUT THE most brilliantly successful scene I remember seeing in a musical comedy turns up somewhere about halfway through My Fair Lady, the adaptation of Shaw’s Pygmalion at the Mark Hellinger. Eliza Doolittle, the Cockney flower girl whom Professor Henry Higgins is grooming to talk like a lady, suddenly manages to say “The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plains” with all its treacherous vowels intact, and so enchanted are her listeners that they go into a triumphant little tango by way of celebration. It is a moment that has practically everything—charm, style, wit, gaiety—and I will cherish it as long as I live. The rest of the play never quite achieves this magic level, but it is still all wonderfully entertaining, and extraordinarily welcome in a season that previously offered no musicals except two glum exploits called The Vamp and Pipe Dream.

  My Fair Lady is meritorious in every department, but probably its greatest accomplishment lies in its remarkable humanization of Mr. Shaw, who has been transformed from an amiable but fundamentally sardonic observer of human behavior into a beaming old sentimentalist, as warm and lovable as Santa Claus. The changes and elisions that Alan Jay Lerner has made in the text are surprisingly few, considering the peculiar demands of musical comedy, but there is certainly a new sympathy for love. In Pygmalion, the approach, while by no means hostile, was still pretty chilly and vegetarian, giving the impression that the author was quite willing to tolerate sex but rather preferred to discuss the caste system. Mr. Lerner has remedied that. The science of phonetics and the general absurdity of hereditary aristocracy get into My Fair Lady all right, but the real emphasis is enthusiastically on romance. It seems to me that here and there something has been lost—Eliza’s raffish papa, for instance, is a healthier and much less complicated scoundrel than he was in the original—but on the whole it is a highly intelligent and tremendously engaging piece of work. An only slightly smaller miracle has been accomplished with the songs, whose lyrics, by Mr. Lerner, if not precisely Shavian, are always cheerfully in key with the rest of the proceedings, and whose melodies, composed by Mr. Frederick Loewe, are as bright and stylish as everything else about the production. In addition to its pleasant sound, My Fair Lady is entrancing to look at. Oliver Smith’s sets, ranging from the crazy squalor of Covent Garden to the icy grandeur of an embassy ballroom, are handsome, posterlike inventions, and Cecil Beaton’s costumes—by far the best we’ve seen this year—show impressive wit and imagination. People really looked like something in 1912, I thought, surveying my neighbors in the opening-night audience, who seemed to have gone out of their way to dress in a singularly melancholy and uninspiring fashion.

  As Eliza, Julie Andrews fulfills all the promise she showed last year in The Boy Friend. The part, of course, could hardly be more gratifying to an actress, since the transition from the screeching Cockney slattern of the early scenes to the composed and majestic elocutionist of the later ones is almost guaranteed sorcery, but Miss Andrews goes far beyond the obvious effects. She turns very satisfactorily from a howling savage into a suitable companion for duchesses, but there remains a fine suggestion of incorruptible vulgarity smoldering somewhere inside. Even when her poise and accent are most implacable, she still seems just on the verge of a yell. It is a hilarious and at the same time singularly touching performance. Rex Harrison, who plays Higgins, is rumored to have resisted even the slightest tampering with the original text, and there are times when he appears to be condescending somewhat to Mr. Lerner’s version of the role. Nevertheless, it is generally an attractive effort, and he talks his songs at least as effectively as a lot of actors would sing them. Stanley Holloway, as Doolittle, is marvellously funny in his rendering of two numbers called “With a Little Bit of Luck” and “Get Me to the Church on Time,” and there are other valuable contributions by Robert Coote, as a stuffy bulwark of the Empire; Cathleen Nesbitt, as a handsome Mayfair matron; and Viola Roache, Philippa Bevans, and John Michael King, in more or less subordinate assignments. Moss Hart has directed the cast of thirty-one with his customary skill, and Hanya Holm has staged at least two dances that struck me as being as lovely as dreams.

  KENNETH TYNAN

  MARCH 21, 1959 (ON A RAISIN IN THE SUN)

  HE SUPREME VIRTUE of A Raisin in the Sun, Lorraine Hansberry’s new play at the Ethel Barrymore, is its proud, joyous proximity to its source, which is life as the dramatist has lived it. I will not pretend to be impervious to the facts; this is the first Broadway production of a work by a colored authoress, and it is also the first Broadway production to have been staged by a colored director. (His name is Lloyd Richards, and he has done a sensible, sensitive, and impeccable job.) I do not see why these facts should be ignored, for a play is not an entity in itself, it is a part of history, and I have no doubt that my knowledge of the historical context predisposed me to like A Raisin in the Sun long before the house lights dimmed. Within ten minutes, however, liking had matured into absorption. The relaxed, freewheeling interplay of a magnificent team of Negro actors drew me unresisting into a world of their making, their suffering, their thinking, and their rejoicing. Walter Lee Younger’s family lives in a roach-ridden Chicago tenement. The father, at thirty-five, is still a chauffeur, deluded by dreams of financial success that nag at the nerves and tighten the lips of his anxious wife, who ekes out their income by working in white kitchens. If she wants a day off, her mother-in-law advises her to plead flu, because it’s respectable. (“Otherwise they’ll think you’ve been cut up or something.”) Five people—the others being Walter Lee’s progressive young sister and his only child, an amiable small boy—share three rooms. They want to escape, and their chance comes when Walter Lee’s mother receives the insurance money to which her recent widowhood has entitled her. She rejects her son’s plan, which is to invest the cash in a liquor store; instead, she buys a house for the family in a district where no Negro has ever lived. Almost at once, white opinion asserts itself, in the shape of a deferential little man from the local Improvement Association, who puts the segregationist case so gently that it almost sounds like a plea for modified togetherness. At the end of a beautifully written scene, he offers to buy back the house, in order—as he explains—to spare the Youngers any possible embarrassment. His proposal is turned down. But before long Walter Lee has lost what remains of the money to a deceitful chum. He announces forthwith that he will go down on his knees to any white man who will buy the house for more than its face value. From this degradation he is finally saved; shame brings him to his feet. The Youngers move out, and move on; a rung has been scaled, a point has been made, a step into the future has been soberly taken.

  Miss Hansberry’s piece is not without sentimentality, particularly in its reverent treatment of Walter Lee’s mother; brilliantly though Claudia McNeil plays the part, monumentally trudging, upbraiding, disapproving, and consoling, I wish the dramatist had refrained from idealizing such a stolid old conservative. (She forces her daughter, an agnostic, to repeat after her, “In my mother’s house there is still God.”) But elsewhere I have no quibbles. Sidney Poitier blends skittishness, apathy, and riotous despair into his portrait of the mercurial Walter Lee, and Ruby Dee, as his wife, is not afraid to let friction and frankness get the better of conventional affection. Diana Sands is a buoyantly assured kid sister, and Ivan Dixon is a Nigerian intellectual who replies, when she asks him whether Negroes in power would not be just as vicious and corrupt as whites, “I live the answer.” The cast is flawless, and the teamwork on the first night was as effortless and exuberant as if the play had been running for a hundred performances. I was not present at the opening, twenty-four years ago, of Mr. Odets’ Awake and Sing, but it must have been a similar occasion, generating the same kind of sympathy and communicating the same kind of warmth. After several curtain calls, the audience began to shout for the author, whereupon Mr. Poitier leaped down into the auditorium and dragged Miss Hansberry onto the stage. It was a glorious gesture, but it did no more than the
play had already done for all of us. In spirit, we were up there ahead of her.

  MAY 30, 1959 (ON GYPSY)

  UITE APART FROM considerations of subject matter, perfection of style can be profoundly moving in its own right. If anyone doubts that, he had better rush to the Broadway Theatre and buy a ticket for Gypsy, the first half of which brings together in effortless coalition all the arts of the American musical stage at their highest point of development. So smooth is the blending of skills, so precise the interlocking of song, speech, and dance, that the sheer contemplation of technique becomes a thrilling emotional experience. It is like being present at the triumphant solution of some harsh architectural problem; stone after massive stone is nudged and juggled into place, with a balance so nice that the finished structure seems as light as an exhalation, though in fact it is earthquakeproof. I have heard of mathematicians who broke down and wept at the sight of certain immaculately poised equations, and I have actually seen a motoring fanatic overcome with feeling when confronted by a vintage Rolls-Royce engine. Gypsy, Act I, confers the same intense pleasure, translated into terms of theatre. Nothing about it is superfluous; there is no display of energy for energy’s sake. No effort is spared, yet none is wasted. Book, lyrics, music, décor, choreography, and cast seem not—as so often occurs—to have been conscripted into uneasy and unconvinced alliance but to have come together by irresistible mutual attraction, as if each could not live without the rest. With no strain or dissonance, a machine has been assembled that is ideally fitted to perform this task and no other. Since the task is worth while, the result is art.

  As everyone must surely be aware, the show is based on the memoirs of Gypsy Rose Lee, the renowned kimonophobe (to use a word of George Jean Nathan’s) whose intellectual aspirations were gently pinked by Rodgers and Hart in a song called “Zip.” Miss Lee’s account of her early life in vaudeville and her subsequent transition to burlesque stripping was dominated by the eccentric, outspoken, and wildly propulsive figure of Rose, her mother. The latter, a nightmare incarnation of Noël Coward’s Mrs. Worthington, put her two daughters on the stage as soon as they could walk, and kept them there, as a coy and piping child act, until both were well into their teens. They had no formal—and very little informal—education. Their parents were divorced when Gypsy, the elder of the sisters, was four years old, and although their mother afterward ran through two other husbands, the liaison in each case was brief, and it cannot be said that the girls ever felt truly fathered. Rose’s pride and cynosure was her younger daughter, Baby June, who has recently published, under her present stage name of June Havoc, an autobiography in which her mother appears as a total monster, forever pressing the children’s noses to the grindstone of her own frustrated ambitions. The show at the Broadway takes Miss Lee’s view, which is rather more temperate; the element of vicarious fulfillment is unmistakably there, but we are encouraged to admire Rose’s shrewdness as much as to dislike her possessiveness. The miraculous first half deals with her obsessive attempts to make Baby June a star, and ends when the child elopes, at the age of fourteen, with one of the boys in the act. As the curtain comes down, Rose has erased June from her mind and transferred her fantasies of fame to the gauche, neglected elder sibling. I don’t know that I shall ever forget the way Sandra Church, as Gypsy, quails and shakes when she encounters her mother’s heady, appraising stare and guesses what is in store for her. It is like watching a rabbit petrified by the headlights of a silently onrushing car.

  Although Miss Church happens to be acting better than anyone else of her age on Broadway, a lot of people are equally responsible for the wonder of that first act. Jule Styne, the most persistently underrated of popular composers, has contributed to it nine songs, all of which are both exciting in themselves and relevant to the action—from the opening chorus, “May We Entertain You?,” a splendid pastiche of ragtime vapidity, to “Everything’s Coming Up Roses,” in which Rose, whistling in the dark, tries to persuade herself that life without June is going to be just peachy. In addition, we have “Small World,” an elastically swaying tune used by Rose to seduce Herbie, the agent who becomes her lover; “Little Lamb,” sung by Gypsy to one of her mother’s menagerie of pets; “You’ll Never Get Away from Me,” Rose’s jovial assertion of her man’s dependence; “If Momma Was Married,” in which the daughters complain about their enslavement; and “All I Need Is a Girl,” a song-and-dance number in the Astaire manner, performed by a young man who wants to leave Momma’s troupe and go out on his own. He demonstrates his routine to Gypsy, and invites her to dance with him. This being a musical, she does, but, this being no ordinary musical, she does not know the steps, and the partners end up in a state of mild, enjoyable confusion. The credit for this stroke, and for the whole physical gesture of the evening, belongs to Jerome Robbins, who, as director and choreographer, has poured into Gypsy the same abundance of invention with which he galvanized West Side Story. From the latter show he has borrowed a lyricist, Stephen Sondheim, and a librettist, Arthur Laurents, both of whom have brought to their new jobs an exemplary mixture of gaiety, warmth, and critical intelligence. A passing genuflection will suffice as tribute to Jo Mielziner, who must by now be aware that he is a superlative scenic designer, but I feel I should dwell longer on the cast. On Jacqueline Mayro, for instance, who plays Baby June, the cavorting tot, with a mask of dutiful glee and an absolute mastery of applause-milking devices, such as the pretense of breathlessness after a not particularly exhausting routine. On Lane Bradbury, too, who plays June grown up and ready to bolt. (The aging process is handled superbly, like a movie dissolve; the children dance in a flickering spotlight and are replaced, one at a time, by their adolescent selves.) And, above all, we must linger on Ethel Merman, the most relaxed brass section on earth, singing her heart out and missing none of her own inimitable tricks, among them her habit of sliding down to important words from a grace note above, which supplies the flick that precedes the vocal whipcrack. But Miss Merman not only sings; she acts. I would not say that she acts very subtly; Rose, after all, with her dreams of glory, her kleptomania, her savage parsimony, and her passion for exotic animals and Chinese breakfasts, is scarcely a subtle character. Someone in the show describes her as “a pioneer woman without a frontier,” and that is what Miss Merman magnificently plays.

  The second half, which is briefer, is also less effective. There are several reasons for this. One has to do with plot; having seen the grooming of Baby June, we now watch the grooming of Gypsy, and this makes for redundancy. Another is that Act II contains only three new songs; the rest are reprises. A third is the lack, felt ever more urgently as the hours tick by, of a good, solid male singer; Jack Klugman, the show’s nearest approach to a hero, is an amiable actor, but his voice is no more than an amplified snore. Fourth, Sandra Church is too chaste in demeanor to reproduce the guileful, unhurried carnality with which the real Gypsy undressed. Fifth, we have the finale. Rejected by both her daughters, Miss Merman plods onto the empty stage and bursts into a song about how she could have been better than either of them, given the chance. No sooner has she embarked on what promises to be a burlesque routine of staggering panache than the authors cut in to remind her of their purpose, which is to demonstrate the beastliness of managing mothers. Accordingly, she breaks off in mid-phrase, and sets about lacerating herself in prose. This, I felt, was a case of integrity carried too far. Once Miss Merman has started to sing, nothing short of an air-raid warning should be allowed to interrupt her. To mute her at this point is an act of presumption, and the evening suffers from it. The latter half has in its favor a flamboyant trio of strippers, one of whom peels with her left hand while playing a trumpet with her right. But I don’t see how anyone could deny that the show tapers off from perfection in the first act to mere brilliance in the second.

  PHILIP HAMBURGER

  JANUARY 7, 1950 (ON CANDID CAMERA)

  GENTLEMAN NAMED ALLEN Funt, who presents a television program entitled Candid Camera, has su
cceeded, I think, in reducing the art, the purpose, and the ethics of the “documentary” idea to the level of the obscene. Mr. Funt, who airs his program Monday evenings over C.B.S. and who is sponsored by Philip Morris, employs a simple, deadly formula. Equipped with a hidden movie camera and microphone and a crew of assistant snoopers, he roams the city in various poses, pretending to be, say, a banker, a bootblack, or a mattress salesman. He records on film the words and actions of unsuspecting people, and, when he has finished with them, tells them what he has done to them, asks permission to televise the pictures, and explains that they will be paid off in cash and, I guess, in some dubious fame. For the purposes of his program, he then throws together a half hour of selected shots. Not long ago, for example, a lady entered the mattress department of R. H. Macy & Co. with nothing more in mind than the purchase of a mattress. Approaching what she thought was a salesman, she asked him to show her some mattresses. She naturally thought that the fellow was just another salesman employed by R. H. Macy & Co., but—you’re right—he was Allen Funt, the Candid Camera Man, and he had been hanging around the mattress department, evidently with the jovial connivance of R. H. Macy & Co., ready to pounce on just such an innocent party. Without the customer’s knowledge, he switched on his equipment, and from that moment forward almost everything possible was done to make her look foolish. The salesman (Funt) wondered who was to use the mattress. An old lady, said the customer. How does she sleep, asked the salesman. “Well,” said the customer, “she generally sleeps on her back with her toes up.” “With her toes up!” exclaimed the incredulous salesman (Funt). “We have no mattresses for sale here for people who sleep on their backs with their toes up.” The customer was flabbergasted, but, being a lady and wanting to buy a mattress, she was patient with the salesman. He next wanted to know whether the old lady snored. “Sometimes,” said the customer. “Try the mattress for comfort,” said the salesman (Funt). “Bounce up and down on it.” The customer bounced up and down on the mattress, right there in the mattress department of R. H. Macy & Co. What a gimmick! She thought she was just testing a mattress, see, but actually she was bouncing up and down, potentially, in the view of thousands of Peeping Toms watching her on television. Finally, Funt confessed to her that her every word and her every action had been recorded, and her embarrassment at this disclosure was likewise recorded.