Royal and Fair

It seems that just last season a play had to come from England to have any chance of success in New York. This year that sine qua non, provenance, has picked up and moved to another locale: the Past. Any past will doo as long as the play ain’t noo. From the past perfect of Henry V to the past imperfect of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? we’ve been trekking and déja-viewing.

Two of the resuscitations that promise to create a life of their own this time round are what on the surface would seem a quite faulty farce of the late Twenties and a foolproof musical of the mid-Fifties. The former, Kaufman and Ferber’s The Royal Family, comes through royally, while the latter, Lerner and Loewe’s My Fair Lady, does only fairly.

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Harvey E. Phillips

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It seems that just last season a play had to come from England to have any chance of success in New York. This year that sine qua non, provenance, has picked up and moved to another locale: the Past. Any past will doo as long as the play ain’t noo. From the past perfect of Henry V to the past imperfect of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? we’ve been trekking and déja-viewing.

Two of the resuscitations that promise to create a life of their own this time round are what on the surface would seem a quite faulty farce of the late Twenties and a foolproof musical of the mid-Fifties. The former, Kaufman and Ferber’s The Royal Family, comes through royally, while the latter, Lerner and Loewe’s My Fair Lady, does only fairly.