CRIMSON PLAYGOER

It began with the sixty-five cents. The box office, it seems, held no allurements. And then there was the foyer, and with it, all relative to the sixty-five cents, was that appealing influence of Oxford on a South End accent gently intoning that discouraged something about a "Bettah seelekshun." Those fifteen pairs of trodden toes reacted in the usual incoherent manner. The patron saint of sleeping dogs keeps watch over the soles of metropolitan theatre-goers.

"Women Accused" originally cooked up by the "World's Ten Greatest Authors" in the cauldrons of Liberty Hall, may perfectly be classed as a Hughes success with little Baum in the gallery. The essential principle is calculated to dampen the kerchiefs of high school damsels and police commissioners. There is Nancy Carroll swatting somebody or other behind the ear with a pretty green statue of September Morn, there is Cary Grant rigged out in the yachting costume of an Argentine cowboy, there are sober extras in the middle of a three-day cruise, there are finger print experts smearing powder on beige telephones, there are twenty-eight kisses, and a corpse. One reacts, of course, to the ingenuity of the "howler," somehow reminiscent of that cornet next door. But aside from this, no Kerr is spared in soothing the patronage.

The final impression is that of Sevitzky and his energetic attempts to revive Schubert. If sarcophagal revolutions are any indication, one may judge that the effort was not in vain.