Word: spewacks
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Perhaps the kindest comment a reviewer could make about Sam and Bella Spewack's latest comedy is this: It is not up to their usual standards. Festival, however, is more than a disappointment in a season of surprisingly bad comedies, and any playgoer who hopes that it will compensate for assorted Tender Traps and Black-Eyed Susans will soon find that it ranks with the worst of them...
...attempt to recap the plot would be useless, even impossible, but presumably the Spewack team felt that a child prodigy, several eccentric musicians, and a female music instructor would be funny in themselves--especially if the music instructor palms the prodigy off as her illegitimate son in order to get him an audition. Add to this the inevitable misunderstandings, and some dialogue on sophistication, and the authors have succeeded in compounding confusion at the expense of interest...
Porter is not the only disappointment of the evening. George S. Kaufman and wife have failed to do for Ninotchka what Sam Spewack and wife did for Taming of the Shrew. In the Kaufmans' version, propaganda and comedy are blended in the worst proportions. Near final curtain, when they decide that perhaps the audience is convinced that Paris is preferable to Siberia, the authors throw in a few old anti-anti-Communist jokes and call it a night...
...dancing; Graham Greene's The Living Room; Lunatics and Lovers, a satire on sex plays, by Sidney (Dead End) Kingsley ; Portrait of a Lady, an adaptation of the Henry James novel, with Jennifer Jones; Truman Capote's musical, The House of Flowers, with Pearl Bailey; Sam & Bella Spewack's new comedy, Festival, starring Vanessa Brown; G.B. Shaw's Saint Joan, with Jean Arthur; Sayonara: A Japanese Romance, a musical adaptation of James A. Michener's novel by Josh Logan, Paul Osborn and Irving Berlin...
...heartless capitalist. To add insult to bankruptcy, Ducotel's daughter is hopelessly in love with Trochard's nephew, who can only marry on the pain of disinheritance. At this point, it might be said with some justification that this is nothing new, even under the Guiana sun. Actually, when Spewack introduces the convicts, he provides both a new twist and the play's central theme...