Old Play in Manhattan

Candida (by George Bernard Shaw; produced by Katharine Cornell in association with Gilbert Miller) has come to seem, with the years, almost as much Katharine Cornell's property as Bernard Shaw's. As the radiant lady fought over by the prating parson she married and the mewling poet she bewitched, Actress Cornell long ago found one of her most triumphant roles. Last week she was playing it on Broadway for the fourth time, and playing it well. But the cast surrounding her was not the one whose brilliant teamwork made the previous revival, in 1942, a real event. Hence what came across the footlights was a half-century-old comedy that at times showed its age, at other times its artifice.

Candida's scalawag father (Sir Cedric Hardwicke) was often amusing; the prissy Prossy (Mildred Natwick) almost always was. But though Marlon Brando got a measure of individuality into Marchbanks, Shaw's soft-shelled poet seemed once again a wight that never was on sea or land. And Parson Morell (Wesley Addy) was not the man for whom Prossy would have pined or Candida gladly drudged. Candida's choosing him over Marchbanks seemed largely, last week, like choosing the lesser of two evils.

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