The Crimson Playgoer

For its three acts of solid suspense, piffling but none the loss deadly, John Murray and Allen Boretz's "Room Service" surpasses the most lugubrious of tragedies. In fact, although it is farcical throughout and even borders on the slap-stick, it threatens more than once to drop off into sheer disaster. It has to do with the now familiar theme of putting on a show, but the hopelessness of the predicaments into which the youthful producer breezes is amazingly original. Those dilemmas are also uproarious, except that there is grave danger lest the sympathetic souls in the audience become too busy feeling sorry to be able to laugh.

If you look too closely into the plot, you will see the unnatural spectacle of a hotel executive, willy-nilly backer of a play, making savage efforts to scotch the play because the producers have been concealing from him their mad shifts and hair-breadth escapes from destruction. But the dangers springing from his violent disposition make the real play all the more exciting, and the comedy-writer's license takes care of the rest. So we see Gordon Miller, hare-brained producer, catching hold of Leo Davis, rustic playwright, rifling his pockets, pawning his typewriter, putting him to bed on account of measles with tape-worm complications, starving him almost to death and then making him play dead besides, all because nobody has any money and it wouldn't do to be thrown out of the hotel. One of the most startling revelations in the art of welching is the way in which the troop of them prepares to give the hotel the slip, each of them dressed in five or six suits so as to sacrifice nothing.

The play is a little raw here and there, were scattered murmers in the audience over the villain's stock of phrase, which happens to be the only piece of real blasphemy the English language can boast.

Hume Cronyn received a hearty welcome from the first-nighters for the good work he has already done in Boston, and his performance belied no one's expectations. Cast as the hoosier dramatist, he is triumphantly ludicrous throughout. He confides, grins and goes into raptures just as country boys, according to dramatic convention, always do. None of the actors uses any restraint, but in a farce of this sort the heavier the lines are drawn, the better.