New Plays in Manhattan

Lunatics and Lovers (by Sidney Kingsley) represents a new venture--into farce --for the author of Men in White, Dead End and Detective Story. But, though it certainly has its good points, there is nothing new about Lunatics and Lovers itself. The scene is a farce-hallowed Broadway hotel suite sprinkled with hotel sweeties. People constantly enter and exit, there are confabs and wisecracks, phone calls and flunkeys and cops. Some of the characters are crooked, others are crocked; the talk is extremely lowdown, and the lust unbounded. Nothing could be socially less conventional or theatrically more so.

Playwright Kingsley, who perhaps sees life more in terms of character actors than of any other one thing, has created some lively parts and, with the help of his own deft staging, has achieved some entertaining performances. Particular bright spots are Buddy Hackett as a fat racketeer, Dennis King as a spouting and swilling judge, Mary Anderson as a wronged wife out on a bender, and Vicki Cummings as an experienced blonde. And Playwright Kingsley has contrived some funny scenes, including one of a cutie (Sheila Bond) keeping open house while taking a bubble bath.

But for all its sedulous devotion to the raffish, the evening is not entirely a success: there are ups and downs and starts and stops. Fine when it is funny, the play goes flat when it is all too strenuously trying to be. The flesh is weak in Lunatics and Lovers, and at times the inspiration seems even weaker. And hand in hand with a good pungent coarseness in the characters themselves goes a certain touch of vulgarity in the treatment of them. Nor, for all its lowdownness, is Lunatics and Lovers quite to the gutter born, with a truly deep-seated sense of

Let them cant about decorum Who have characters to lose.

Boy Meets Siren, but winds up happily in wifey's arms; and the tough guy, it turns out is all custard filling underneath. Perhaps one reason why Lunatics and Lovers keeps straining so hard to seem amusingly sinful is that all the time it is really playing safe.

Witness for the Prosecution (by Agatha Christie) is Broadway's first really bright evening of crime since Dial "M" for Murder. In an age of dwindling stage whodunits (there aren't even many bad ones), the expert Miss Christie has fetched up another of her tidy yarns, tossed in a finely conducted English courtroom trial, and has then, when all is over, overturned it all with not one shattering twist but three.

A young man is arrested for the murder of a rich spinster who had just made him her heir. His alibi is that he was at home when the murder was committed--which his wife will bear witness to. But at the trial the wife--who, it turns out, is not really his wife--repudiates his story. At this point things really start humming, but at this point must be enforced the First Commandment for whodunits: thou shalt not tell.

Staged with particular skill and verve by Robert Lewis, Witness for the Prosecution is frequently tense. And when it is not, it manages in the best English fashion to be entertainingly easygoing. In a generally good cast Patricia Jessel achieves some real acting as the enigmatic wife; and as defense lawyer, Francis Sullivan is full of delightful courtroom wiles and histrionics. All of Witness for the Prosecution is classically rendered, with no outre horrors or ultramodern gruesomeness, and with no need for any.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.