New Plays in Manhattan

The Children's Hour (by Lillian Hellman; Herman Shumlin, producer) is a neat theatrical blend of A High Wind In Jamaica and The Captive. Playwright Hellman, divorced wife of Cinema Scenarist Arthur Kober, has learned how to put a play together. She is also wise, to the arcane criminality of childhood, to the no less delicate subject of female homosexuality.

To the Wright-Dobie School for girls goes little Mary Tilford (Florence McGee), granddaughter of the young institution's chief patroness. As poisonous a moppet as ever twisted a playmate's arm, Mary is a prodigal liar, an incorrigible marplot, the school's petted problem child. Punishment for her misdeeds arouses in her a persecution complex and a thirst to revenge herself on the Misses Wright & Dobie. Armed with information clandestinely gathered from Mlle de Maupin, Mary convinces her righteous grandmother that Miss Dobie is in love with Miss Wright, that she has witnessed grave misbehavior. The grandmother ruins the school by spreading the tale. The accused young women ruin themselves by pressing an unsuccessful libel suit. Alone in a deserted classroom, Karen Wright (Katherine Emery) and Martha Dobie (Anne Revere) are faced with a hopeless future. In her morbidity, Martha reveals that although Karen is innocent, she, Martha, has not been entirely guiltless in intent. She goes to her room. There is a gunshot. In one of the soundest bits of acting seen this season, Actress Emery lets a full half-minute pass before she reacts to the report.

As shrewd Producer Shumlin (Grand Hotel) knows, plays about homosexuals or children seldom fail. To take the part of impish Mary he looked no farther than Miss McGee who had played in the U. S. stage version of Maedchen In Uniform. Miss McGee, who squeezes the last drop of perverse venom from her characterization, is a reed-slim actress of 23 who can pass on any stage for 13. Born of British parents in South Africa, she was taken to Canada when young, went to the University of Toronto. She has been trouping for four years, is thoroughly sick of the child parts she plays so admirably.

Anything Goes offers an embarrassment of theatrical riches.

Its music is by Cole Porter, who has been writing hits ever since he composed "Bulldog, Bulldog, Eli Yale" 21 years ago. His score for Anything Goes, while it does not include a melody as sensational as his "Night & Day" for last year's Gay Divorce, is as good as the best any of his peers are turning out.

Leading lady is witty, torch-singing Ethel Merman, whose face is as plump as her voice is sharp. Anything Goes further boasts the services of debonair William Gaxton and wistful Victor Moore, respectively President Wintergreen and Vice President Throttlebottom of Of Thee I Sing. Funny as Victor Moore was as Throttlebottom, he is funnier still as "Moonface" Mooney, Public Enemy No. 13. Disguised as a parson, he is forced to flee the country on an ocean liner, soon attaches himself to Billy Crocker (Gaxton), a playboy following a long-lost sweetheart, and Reno Sweeney (Merman), an evangelist turned night club operator.

From time to time Anything Goes pauses in its narrative maze of mistaken identities and lovers' misunderstandings to turn lyrically topical. For example, Miss Merman sings this chorus of the theme song:

Mrs. R. with all her trimmin's Can broadcast a bed from Simmons, 'Cause Franklin knows, Anything goes.

The only character who is disappointed in an otherwise happy ending is Mr. Moore. All along he has been hoping that when the Department of Justice announces its gangster ratings for the coming year he will be promoted at least to Public Enemy No. 8. Great is his disappointment when the troupe lands in England and receives a cable that "Moonface" is not wanted at home for anything. Mr. Moore grimaces pathetically, stamps his foot and declares: "I don't know what to make of this Administration!"

Few spectators who witnessed this slick musicomedy success last week could have guessed the travail its book had undergone. When the Morro Castle caught fire last September off the New Jersey coast, killed 134 people and ran aground, it also wrecked the libretto of Producer Vinton Freedley's Anything Goes. Months before in France, the oldtime British libretto team of Guy Bolton and Pelham Grenville Wodehouse had written a comic script about a marine disaster. The Morro Castle tragedy instantly ruled it out as a subject for fun-making. Producer Freedley sent up a distress signal, got two able U. S. showmen, Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse, to re-do the whole job in three weeks.

Happily the Cole Porter score needed no tinkering. Best tunes: "I Get a Kick Out of You," "You're the Top," "Anything Goes."

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