Grand Duchess Tatiana and Co

The trick, of course, when you take a dated comedy and stage it thirty years later, is to give the audience a feeling of nostalgia, and not of the pip. Will those bobs of the twenties evoke friendly or derisory laughter? And the shimmy era dresses? and the handsome dove-grey spats? If the producer can make the nostalgia stick, he has that fearsome beast, The Broadway Audience, halfway conquered, and more than halfway prepared to go his way.

In Tovarich, the musical remake of the Claudette Colbert-Charles Boyer movie of the mid-thirties, Director Peter Glenville has turned the trick. The Grand Duchess Tatiana (Vivien Leigh), late of Czarist Russia, and her husband Prince Mikail Ouratieff (Jean-Pierre Aumont) are living in a Paris garret nourished only by what the Grand Duchess manages to steal from open-air markets, although they could at any time write a check for four billion francs (old, old). But the money is a sacred trust from the late Czar-God-rest-his-soul (whenever he is mentioned every Russian in the room leaps to his feet and crosses himself) and will be returned intact to the next Czar. The plot revolves around the attempts of Commissar Gorovchenko to get hold of the money when he finally tracks down the penniless billionaires at the home of an American industrialist from Wilkes-Barre, Pa., where they have taken refuge, he as “an elegant butler,” she as “an elegant maid.”

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Priscilla L. Buckley

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The trick, of course, when you take a dated comedy and stage it thirty years later, is to give the audience a feeling of nostalgia, and not of the pip. Will those bobs of the twenties evoke friendly or derisory laughter? And the shimmy era dresses? and the handsome dove-grey spats? If the producer can make the nostalgia stick, he has that fearsome beast, The Broadway Audience, halfway conquered, and more than halfway prepared to go his way.

In Tovarich, the musical remake of the Claudette Colbert-Charles Boyer movie of the mid-thirties, Director Peter Glenville has turned the trick. The Grand Duchess Tatiana (Vivien Leigh), late of Czarist Russia, and her husband Prince Mikail Ouratieff (Jean-Pierre Aumont) are living in a Paris garret nourished only by what the Grand Duchess manages to steal from open-air markets, although they could at any time write a check for four billion francs (old, old). But the money is a sacred trust from the late Czar-God-rest-his-soul (whenever he is mentioned every Russian in the room leaps to his feet and crosses himself) and will be returned intact to the next Czar. The plot revolves around the attempts of Commissar Gorovchenko to get hold of the money when he finally tracks down the penniless billionaires at the home of an American industrialist from Wilkes-Barre, Pa., where they have taken refuge, he as “an elegant butler,” she as “an elegant maid.”