Word: beckets
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This season Merrick has two of his old shows on the road (Destry Rides Again and La Plume de Ma Tante), one Broadway holdover (Gypsy), four new hits (A Taste of Honey, Irma La Douce, Do Re Mi and Becket) and one miss (Vintage )60). In all, his 20 shows have cost $4,000,000 to produce, grossed $40 million and repaid $8,000,000 to their angels, including Merrick. Says the producer, who sometimes talks in sporting terms although he is in no sense a sport: "I'm rolling a hot pair of dice...
...reach any stature: Tennessee Williams' disappointing domestic comedy, Period of Adjustment, and Arthur Laurents' clever but empty Invitation to a March, Clearly the most provocative plays are all imported originals-A Taste of Honey, by Britain's young (19 when she wrote it) Shelagh Delaney; Becket, by France's Jean Anouilh; The Hostage (closed), by Ireland's Brendan Behan...
Group III. Upcoming in this category (which included A Taste of Honey, Becket and Irma La Douce, among other fall openers) is Producer-Director-Writer Dore Schary's The Devil's Advocate, based on the Morris West bestseller about a contemporary case of sainthood in Italy. In the past, while wearing each of the three hats, Schary has scored 50% of the time, while his leading actor, Sam (Guys and Dolls) Levene, good as he is, has had a loser a year since...
...Becket himself-whom Henry made archbishop as his shield against the church, only to emerge Becket's target-rewardingly probed. This is a troublesome task, for Becket's abrupt shift from worldling to ascetic, from Henry's helpful administrator to his hostile priest, needs probing; indeed, the whole unsimple man who suddenly found God needs probing. But the Becket whom a historian has dubbed "a great actor superbly living the parts he was called upon to play" seems far less than that, even with a great actor, Laurence Olivier, on hand to play him. Olivier...
...trouble is, perhaps, that Becket did not fascinate Anouilh; he merely tempted and challenged him. With that great facility that is his most self-damaging gift, Anouilh has contrived blunt or ironic or booming effects, pulled off scenes involving bedrooms and bishops and cynical Kings of France, and some fine reflective moments too, as when Becket resists the snare of a false humility. But with equal ease Anouilh goes in for every approach, from the slangiest to the most sculptured. He has thus set Peter Glenville problems of staging that have been only partly solved: with the most inward...