Tryout on the Coast

Ladies and Gentlemen (by Charles MacArthur and Ben Hecht, from a play by Ladislaus Bush-Fekete; produced by Gilbert Miller). Decade ago the late Minnie Maddern Fiske huffed, barked, flounced her way through a typical virtuoso's vehicle, Ladies of the Jury. Hungarian Ladislaus Bush-Fekete (ne Bus-Fekete: the "h" was his idea of Americanizing the name) made a play with the same situation--a resourceful woman swinging the rest of a jury around from a verdict of guilty to acquittal in a murder case.

As translated, and practically rewritten, by Hecht and MacArthur (The Front Page, 20th Century), Ladies and Gentlemen gives Helen Hayes (Mrs. MacArthur) her first new play after three years and 969 performances of Victoria Regina. She was glad to escape from that "rarefied atmosphere," says she, "because I am fearful of becoming the centre of a cult." Ladies and Gentlemen, after opening in Santa Barbara, last week started a month's tryout on the West Coast--two weeks each in San Francisco and Los Angeles. Miss Hayes said her husband felt that, if she must play in his piece, it had better begin as far from Broadway as possible.

Co-star with Helen Hayes is Herbert Marshall; he, a frustrated architect; she, a cinemagnate's secretary. As she cajoles a jury into acquitting a man accused of killing his wife because he loves another, she falls in love with Marshall, a juror. As San Francisco saw Ladies and Gentlemen, the final curtain brought renunciation. Instead of going away with the secretary, the architect made ready to send his son to Europe, "in search of my lost youth." But the play had a bad case of third-act anemia, for which the authors last week were preparing transfusions. Ladies and Gentlemen pleased San Francisco, may make good box-office on Broadway because of: 1) its stars, 2) its Hecht-MacArthur gags. Sample (by a frequently-pregnant woman): "My husband says I'm better than an honest slot machine."

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