The Crimson Playgoer

This reviewer entered the awesome Loew's State theatre prepared to sigh for what might have been; to long for the scintillating gleam of a brilliant stage play in the face of a chaos of office-and-bedroom scenes on the screen. Robert Sherwood's sparkling drama of old and New Vienna shall be thought of in terms of Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, said he to himself and properties and photography will at last get their share of criticism. But this plan never worked out. With the first scene the reviewer is in the thick of a play which combines the brittle wit of Oscar Wilde with the mellow sentiment of "Der Kongress Tanzt." Old Vienna, with its archdukes and New Vienna with its psychoanalysts and yeast specialists. And in ten minutes the Lunt family is forgotten.

Lest this be taken as a slight to Lynn Fontanne, let it be said that her rival, Miss Diana Wynyard is neither better nor worse, which means that Diana is now queen of Hollywood's ball room women--there being two classes of actresses at Hollywood, ballroom ladies, and livingroom ladies. Miss Wynyard has a new coiffure and sports a new and spritely manner in her delightful acting of the part of Eleana, at once wife of a psychiatrist and mistress of an exiled Archduke. All Eleana shows is that, be it ever so sophisticated there is no place like home, and also that love for Prince Rudolph, wish-fulfillment though it may be, is a very delightful complex. But for Diana it is a great showing, a real debut.

To match her there is a new John Barrymore, emerging from the mists of reserve and whimsy felt rather than seen in "Rasputin and the Empress," and in "Grand Hotel." The slow tempo of these parts probably derives from that streak in Barrymore which made an unduly ruminative Hamlet in the old days, while these dashing airs, this hereditarial madness of Hapsburgs and Barrymores recalls Prince Hal of a past decade. In the role of a self-infoxteated. Vienna-crazed Hapsburg Grand Duke, the last of those emotional extroverts known as Prince Charmings, John Barrymore makes Mr. Lunt's "Prince Rudolph" look like a fourth-year graduate student. It may be over-acting, but who would not over-act in this sort of comedy on the shores of the Danube? That was indeed Mr. Lunt's fault; he acted carefully, and well.

So much for Vienna, now for Robert Sherwood and his Broadway wit. This play offers more than sentiment and satire. It offers the quintessence of bubbling dialogue, refined repartee and waltzing love-scenes. It represents all the nuances and emotional fires which lie behind the less bourgeois legends, from Prince Charlie to Prince Mike Romanoff.