New Plays in Manhattan

Father Malachy's Miracle (adapted by Brian Doherty from Bruce Marshall's novel; produced by Delos Chappell). When devout little Father Malachy (Al Shean), with the help of God (offstage), sent a dance hall whizzing 20 miles through the air, he was not damning dance halls. He was proving to a skeptical Anglican parson (Frank Greene) miracles could still be performed, and he hit on the dance hall only because it was handy. The miracle was a fine success, but the Pope disapproved. "Too showy and new-fangled," said the bishop (St. Clair Bayfield). The dance-hall customers also complained, although, after the cabaret took off from its Edinburgh street, it made a perfect three-point landing on a crag at sea without spilling a drink or disturbing the floor show.

Suspecting Father Malachy of being in league with Red Russia, a policeman tries to arrest him for disorderly conduct. A high-voltage U. S. publicity man angles for exclusive rights to promote Father Malachy in movies and press. A suave cardinal on a secret visit from Rome announces that Mother Church considers it unwise to recognize the miracle officially. Assuming that Father Malachy intended to cleanse the parish morally, the cardinal reasons: ''If priests were to make a habit of moving cabarets every time they exceed the theological definition of chastity . . . the air would be filled with flying cabarets."

Snubbed and misunderstood, Father Malachy realizes that the world is not ready for miracles. The dance hall, which he hoped to convert into a shrine, changes its name to The Miracle Casino, does business by the boat load. On Christmas Eve Malachy kneels among the Casino's drunken customers and performs a second wonder which leaves things pretty much at scratch.

Where older hands fumble the difficult job of turning books into plays, Playwright Doherty, a young Toronto barrister, succeeds. His dramatization retains the saltily reverent flavor that won for Bruce Marshall's novel an appreciative public.

Al Shean (ne Schoenberg), as Father Malachy, atones for lack of force by endearing benignity. He was just as endearing nearly 18 years ago when, with the late Ed Gallagher, he stepped out on a Bronx vaudeville stage to introduce a refrain that still echoes its "Positively, Mr. Gallagher. Absolutely, Mr. Shean." Gallagher & Shean kept the nation chuckling over their fresh lyrical topicalities for five years, until fame and boomtime stage salaries went to Gallagher's head. He dissipated fortune and health, died almost penniless. Shean preserved his equilibrium and his money, played on Broadway in Light Wines and Beer, Music in the Air, returned to, Hollywood in 1934 as a cinema character actor. Least-known fact about him is that he is an uncle of the comic Marx Brothers.

Madame Bovary (adapted by Benn W. Levy from Gaston Baty's dramatization of the Flaubert novel; Theatre Guild Inc., producer). In 1857 Gustave Flaubert was haled into court, along with the editor and printer of the magazine in which Madame Bovary first ran serially, to stand trial for immorality. They were acquitted. When the play stood trial last week before Manhattan's critics, the verdict was not so favorable. Messrs. Levy & Baty were judged guilty not of indecency but of translating a first-rate novel into a second-rate play. It is still the story of a romantic, passionate, neurotic woman married to an unseeing, devoted clod; its 16 scenes articulate the skeleton of the book, but its dress is the scarecrow trappings of melodrama.

Emma Bovary (Constance Cummings) is shown accepting but not encouraging the homage of Leon Dupuis (Carl Harbord). In clipped Oxfordese, Mr. Harbord demands, "What's the use of imagination if you daon't imegine something bettah than life?" while Dr. Bovary (Harold Ver-milyea) and his companion fall asleep over their chess game. Emma's doubts and dissatisfactions are conveyed by off-stage taunts and titters from six young women seated in balcony boxes. After rich, dashing Rodolphe Boulanger (Eric Portman) has begun his seduction in Homais' (Ernest Cossart) pharmacy, the six young women relate its consummation in the woods. From there the action plods doggedly on through Boulanger's abandonment, the return from Paris of Leon Dupuis, the sordid liaison in Rouen, the machinations of the usurer Lheureux (Ernest Thesiger), the suicide in which Miss Cummings (Mrs. Benn W. Levy), after getting her arsenic and licking it greedily from her hands, emits a final scream and topples to the floor in a tumble that would do credit to a football player.

Proud of their robot stage, which permits Madame Bovary's 16 scenes to be switched in split seconds, the Theatre Guild next week plans a special "curtainless" matinee, to show students of stagecraft how it is done.

Too Many Heroes (by Dore Senary; Carly Wharton, producer). Four years ago a hysterical mob invaded the San Jose. Calif., jail, seized two kidnap-murderers, staged a gory lynching which mothers held their children up to see and California's late Governor James Rolph Jr. condoned.

For an angry first act Dore Schary's play parallels the San Jose incident. It follows the grim growth of lynching sentiment, shows a wavering hero (James Bell), his conscientious objections finally swept away by the mob's hysteria, killing one of the victims with an iron bar in a clamorous, jail-invading climax. This much is stirring, surefire theatre. Then five dreary scenes show the remorseful lyncher trying vainly to give himself up to a sheriff who would rather forget the whole affair, successively losing his friends, job, wife, and finally his life in a soul-assuaging defense of the slatternly widow of the man he killed--a hero who fumbles his penance as badly as he does his ideals.

Author Dore Schary, a onetime pressagent, journalist, actor, and scenarist (Mississippi), wrote Too Many Heroes three years ago, peddled it around until this season when Carly Wharton (one of Broadway's woman producers) agreed to put the play on. In that she made a mistake. Hollywood's They Won't Forget and Fury both recorded far more accurately the swelling passion of mobs bent on lynching. Too Many Heroes is the sort of thing they can do much better in the cinema.

Robin Landing (by Stanley Young; Sidney Harmon and T. Edward Hambleton, producers) is a free-verse drama of considerable literary pretensions, inconsiderable dramatic moment. Set to music, it might easily rate the top of U. S. opera's dusty heap; presented with the sing-song garrulity of its Manhattan opening, it may well talk itself to death before the composers get around to it.

On the dark and bloody ground of old Kentucky stands 18th Century Robin Landing, the Golden Rule trading post founded by Grant Eaton (Ian Keith), a fugitive from the perfidious East. When his unfaithful but ever-loving wife (Nan Sunderland), and his treacherous brother (Louis Calhern), find him there 18 years later, he is ruling a settlement of happy-go-lucky people and enjoying simple happiness with an Indian wife, a half-breed son nearing manhood. The hell-raising visitation of the Easterners arouses strange passions in the simple folk of Robin Landing, brings sorrow, contention--and, as is inevitable in second-rate dramatics-- tragedy.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.