Festival

Perhaps the kindest comment a reviewer could make about Sam and Bella Spewack's latest comedy is this: It is not up to their usual standards. Festival, however, is more than a disappointment in a season of surprisingly bad comedies, and any playgoer who hopes that it will compensate for assorted Tender Traps and Black-Eyed Susans will soon find that it ranks with the worst of them.

At the opening of the curtain, the audience is confronted with a grotesque set, in all probability a drawing room, whose very garishness seems to set Festival in motion. The play drags on, for the next several hours, seemingly propelled by the inertia of its own ponderous plot, which incidentally, grows more weighty and complicated with the passing minutes. As plots go, this one is more tangled than the usual situational comedy. It is almost as if the authors were improvising on the spot, keeping just a scene or so ahead until at last the actors catch up and the play ends. The final curtain is a surprise--little has happened and nothing is resolved--but it is a welcome one.

Any attempt to recap the plot would be useless, even impossible, but presumably the Spewack team felt that a child prodigy, several eccentric musicians, and a female music instructor would be funny in themselves--especially if the music instructor palms the prodigy off as her illegitimate son in order to get him an audition. Add to this the inevitable misunderstandings, and some dialogue on sophistication, and the authors have succeeded in compounding confusion at the expense of interest.

The cast cannot be criticized too heavily, for their roles are purely mechanical. Paul Henreid, for instance, is nothing more than a label, "eccentric impresario," although he is on stage most of the evening. Perhaps he might have used more imagination, but imagination in this instance should have begun with the authors. Betty Field is even less successful. Just what she is supposed to be, other than a music instructor, is a matter for conjecture. Whatever it was, talent did not come to her rescue. The rest of the cast is comprised of various zany characters, some good (Luba Malina, female cellist) and some bad (Pat Hingle, seller of venctian blinds).

Festival is so devoid of material that it would seem strange that any opportunities for comedy could be missed. There are so few to begin with. Nonetheless, Director Albert Marre could have made better use of several stock comic characters--the Chinese waiter, the deaf professor--who were never even allowed to fulfill their expected functions. In any case, the play is badly written, and the Spewacks should have realized it some time ago.