Word: shumlin
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Margaret Webster finds Broadway much more exciting than London, though she protests that Broadway still reveals "an awful hangover from what the Shuberts did in 1910." Her favorite U. S. directors are Guthrie McClintic (Mamba's Daughters), Herman Shumlin (The Little Foxes), but she. has no desire to be, as they are, a producer as well. Acting, directing, adapting plays, writing a book about her family keep her pleasantly occupied...
...Little Foxes (by Lillian Hellman; produced by Herman Shumlin) is the season's most tense and biting drama-as tense and biting as was Playwright Hellman's The Children's Hour. From the Song of Solomon comes the title: "Take us the foxes, the little foxes, that spoil the vines. . . ." Study of a rapacious Southern family on the make at the turn of the century, The Little Foxes catches the Hubbards-who by sharp bargaining and hard ways have achieved small-town prosperity-on the point of becoming heel-grinding, big-time industrialists...
...Tallulah Bankhead-who, since her return from England in 1933, has floundered around in uncongenial roles-The Little Foxes offers a chance for powerful acting, and she takes it. She plays the masterful Regina with authority and insight. Herman Shumlin has directed the play in a style worthy of its significance and its star...
...Merchant of Yonkers (by Thornton Wilder; produced by Herman Shumlin) is Thornton Wilder on a lark. The play, like the word, is rather out-of-date: Wilder has rewritten an old Viennese farce with no thought of streamlining it. The scene of The Merchant of Yonkers is Manhattan in the '80s. but old as the European theatre is the plot of the sweated apprentices who sneak off for a holiday, of their miserly old master (Percy Waram) on the hunt for a wife, and of the obliging Mrs. Fixit (Jane Cowl) who fixes things to suit herself. The slapstick...
Sweet Mystery of Life (by Richard Maibaum. Michael Wallach & George Haight; Herman Shumlin, producer). Written with one eye on Broadway's hilarious Three Men on a Horse and the other on Hollywood, this farce exhibits the psychological rejuvenation of a grouchy department store tycoon (Gene Lockhart) who fancies himself ready to die. Three scheming vice presidents plan to insure his life, then talk him into his grave. Hastily summoned is a moony ager.t (Hobart Cavanaugh) of Good Life Insurance Co. who observes that "Life Insurance is Immortality." finds himself the dazed recipient of commissions...