Musical

Specially designed to soothe the ear and tickle the rib are these items on the song and dance schedule: Lady, Be Good; Kid Boots, Music Box Revue, I'll Say She Is, Dixie to Broadway, The Grab Bag, Rose-Marie, Ziegfeld Follies.

New Plays

Candida. Some critics felt a strange uncertainty in setting out to inspect the early craftsmanship of Shaw. Had he become old fashioned, his early ideas antiquated in the burst of bright new brainstorms which his very ideas had incited? The curtain went up on the first special matinee of Candida, disclosed Katherine Cornell in the title role, Pedro de Cordoba, Clare Eames, Richard Bird and Ernest Cossart in her support; went down on one of the few notable productions of the season. Shaw's ideas in the play were familiar. But Shaw knew his people must not be simply puppets of protest against a world's uncertainty. He made them flesh and blood; under the spell of a virtually flawless performance, they came poignantly to life. Ideas chip and disappear; emotion is a constant quantity.

A windy clergyman, Babbitt orator and honest man, is married to the wistfully wise, perilously attractive Candida. The poet Marchbanks, weakling in body but with a warrior mind, persuades the windy one he is not worthy of his wife. He speaks of love. The windy one bids the wife choose. She takes the honest Babbitt, the man strong before the world; the man least able to bear loneliness. The pliant poet is the hero of the whole.

So, too, was the poet the hero of the performance. As played by Richard Bird, a young Englishman who came with Havoc (TIME, Sept. 15), even the customarily brilliant performance of Katherine Cornell was slightly shaded in comparison. Miss Eames, Mr. de Cordoba and Mr. Cossart completed one of the soundest and most dextrous casts it is the playgoer's fair fortune to contemplate.

Artistic Temperament. Though

padded with a pair of proven actresses (Gail Kane and Elisabeth Risdon), though written by a graduate of Harvard's famed 47 Workshop (Thomas Robinson), one week sufficed to knock this play quite out of competition. It was an aimless story of a writer, his wife, another woman.