New Plays in Manhattan

The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse (by Barre Lyndon; Gilbert Miller, producer) is that highly desirable addition to any theatre season, a smart, smooth, crook play. The fact that the crooks involved are English considerably increases the play's novelty, for Playwright Lyndon's lawbreakers are scarcely the Edward G. Robinson type. They dress shabbily, do not use firearms and are abjectly terrified every time a tall, fatherly police sergeant appears to question or scold them. Even their slang--in which a policeman is a "rozzer," a pal is addressed as "china"-- is more quaint than sinister. Thus the great million-dollar fur robbery which climaxes Dr. Clitterhouse's efficient operations is likely to remind U. S. spectators of a schoolboy raid on the jam closet. Somehow that does not impair the show's excitement.

Almost as harmless and twice as ingratiating as his gang of burglars is Dr. Clitterhouse, gracefully impersonated by Sir Cedric Hardwicke. The amazing doctor has undertaken a part-time life of crime not for gain but to examine at first hand the pathology of crime. How his clinical studies lead him into more trouble than he had bargained for makes a felicitous tale as amusing as the nursery underworld it describes.

Now You've Done It (by Mary Coyle Chase; Brock Pemberton, producer) is notable for being the first play to emerge from the sub-professional Federal Theatre as a regular Broadway production. There its distinction ends, for in spite or because of extensive revision by Director Antoinette Perry (Strictly Dishonorable) and her daughter Margaret's determined impersonation of a bordello's ex-cashier who gets a pretentious politician's family in and out of several difficulties, the show struck most critics as being stereotyped, strained, spurious.

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