Show Business

> Still going strong after 18 months, Pins and Needles 1939, has basted in six new numbers, ripped out four old ones, looks better in its new dress. Best new gag: Neville Chamberlain's "if at first you don't concede, fly, fly again." Best new numbers: The Red Mikado which kids the Mikado epidemic with placards announcing a Flea Mikado and Strip Mikado. One of the neo-Gilbert lyrics:

Three little D. A. R.'s are we . . . Everything is a source of fun, We're all descended from Washington, We don't rent halls to Anderson, Three little D. A. R.'s.

> Last fall English Actor Robert Morley, unknown in the U. S., simultaneously achieved stage fame in the title role of Oscar Wilde, cinema fame as Louis XVI in Marie Antoinette. Last month English Actor Lawrence Olivier, no great name in the U. S., simultaneously achieved stage fame playing opposite Katharine Cornell in No Time for Comedy, cinema fame as Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights. Unlike Morley, Olivier became a terrific matinee idol to boot.

In No Time for Comedy Olivier is cast as the author of a drama about a youth who supposedly dies fighting for Leftist Spain. The boy's scientist father, comforted by "messages" from him, turns spiritualist. The boy turns up, unrecognizable because of face wounds, commits suicide rather than disillusion his father. In the play, the playwright ends by throwing this drama into the wastebasket. But Warner Bros, (discovered Leonard Lyons, unwearied whitewing of Manhattan's night spots) want to buy it for Paul Muni.

> A play called Caesar, by Giovacchino Forzano, opened last week in Rome. The New York Times boldly predicted that the Rome reviews would compare Caesar to "Shakespeare, Goethe and Wagner at their best, and with a touch of genius that even these great men did not attain." "It is understood," continued the fimes, "that a relatively new playwright named Benito Mussolini collaborated with Signer Forzano on this opus."

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