The New Season

Hayride is one of the weirdest things that ever opened a Broadway season, as well as one of the worst. A long, noisy evening of hillbilly music and song, it would lack charm even if it were authentically folkish. Actually, it seems about one part Texas to four parts television.

Dear Charles (adapted by Alan Melville from a comedy by Marc-Gilbert Sauvajon and Frederick Jackson) brougt Tallulah Bankhead back to Broadway after five years--and itself back after ten. A 1944 flop called Slightly Scandalous, was adapted into a Paris hit, then (as Dear Charles) into a London one.

An overaggressive sex comedy, it has been broadened by foreign travel but scarcely brightened, and Tallulah should have thought twice about appearing in it. No doubt she did, and chose it not as challenge but as a field day. Playing a Parisian writer who has had three children by as many lovers, she decides--now that her children wish to marry respectably-that she had better get married herself. The three fathers, after 20 years, are hence bidden to a house party.

Tasteless and labored, Dear Charles has just enough helpful lines and situations to serve Tallulah as a vehicle. If never the least bit Parisian, she is frequently lively. There are those sudden moments when her voice comes up like thunder, or she freezes with raffish hauteur, or has the charm of something caged and carnivorous. There are doubtless nobler ways of being unmistakable and unforgettable, but in a world where few people ever manage to be either, Actress Bankhead remain almost incessantly both.

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