New Play in Manhattan

My 3 Angels (adapted from the French of Albert Husson by Sam & Bella Spewack) makes a very enjoyable evening of an always piquant theme. It tells how three badmen--convicts, in fact--become the good angels of a sadly harassed household. The scene is French Guiana, a region where on Christmas Day the temperature graciously drops to 104DEG, and where convicts can not only hire out but apparently never have to report back. The Messrs. Fixit of My 3 Angels are employed as roofers by a family in dire danger of having no roof over their heads: on the way from France is a snarling cousin, to oust papa from the business he has botched. Along with the cousin is his coldblooded nephew, who is jilting papa's daughter for an heiress.

The three angels--two of them murderers, the third a swindler--take the visitors on. All three badmen have sunny natures, warm hearts, clever hands, sleepless brains; all three are passionate believers in the robinhood of man. Possessing every criminal art and penal grace, they set matters aright in a Gallic Christmas Carol where it is simpler to bump Scrooge off than to convert him.

My 3 Angels is one more comedy that tickles conventional morality with a straw and makes respectability turn out its pockets. But it is much less ironic or satiric than just gloriously improbable; it is a fairy tale in which people commit murder as though it were Drop the Handkerchief.

Light on significance, the play is also light on story: the angels tend to drag their wings here & there, and things are so topsy-turvy that it is the villains who eventually prove dull. But most of the time, under Jose Ferrer's deft direction, the show gaily ripples along. As angel-in-chief, Falstaffian Walter Slezak is steadily delightful.

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