Word: frankener
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...HARRY FRANKEN Columbus, Ohio...
...Hallams (by Rose Franken; produced by William Brown Meloney) are the same Manhattan family that Playwright Franken wrote about, 16 years ago, in Another Language. Most of them are now distinctly middleaged, almost all of them still invincibly middleclass. Doughty Grandma Hallam (well played by Ethel Grimes) still trumpets the glories and responsibilities of the Hallams' name, still tries to keep them all together-and all of them under her thumb...
Playwright Franken has a pretty good eye for all the detail of middle-class family life-the rich son, the poor son; the huffiness and stuffiness; the furnishings and food. But anything in The Hallams that isn't made of velvet or mahogany seems made of cardboard. Whenever the play abandons the household for the heart, whenever it exchanges class or clan reactions for personal emotions, it becomes feeble, trite or depressingly empty...
Doctors Disagree (by Rose Franken; produced by William Brown Meloney) is a piece of pill-coated sugar. Glibly combining heart interest with brain operations, Playwright Franken (Claudia, Outrageous Fortune) keeps an assortment of problems churning. Sore beset is Miss Franken's doctor heroine (Barbara O'Neill) whose neurologist beau (Philip Ober) doubts whether a woman can qualify as a good surgeon. No sooner is he proved wrong than he starts doubting whether a good surgeon can qualify as a woman. The poor girl, meanwhile, is in an awful pickle about disregarding professional ethics in order to save...
...waves of hogwash recede, are often in a class with Canute. In the past month most critics have trounced Frederick Lonsdale's Another Love Story, Lou Walters' Artists and Models, Gypsy Rose Lee's The Naked Genius (which even the author held her nose at), Rose Franken's Outrageous Fortune. All four are hits...