Arts and Manners

In California, where I have been exiled for my sins, the theater, I regret to report, is only a minor incident in people’s lives. The graybeards tell me it wasn’t always thus: there was a time when San Francisco and Los Angeles were exciting show towns, and the youngsters got the same thrills from the theater as the kids of New York. But that’s no longer true. When the California teen-ager says “show,” he means a film; when he says “theater,” he means Grauman’s Chinese.

Not that we don’t get shows, and good ones. Los Angeles has the Biltmore, which gets a fair share of the road dramas, and the Philharmonic, where the enterprising Ed Lester puts on, with grace and distinction, the more popular musicals; Pasadena has its famed Community Playhouse; even Beverly Hills has a nearby theater. But you rarely hear anyone say excitedly, “We’re going to the theater Saturday night.” There are many of our friends who never see a legitimate attraction. And, when you live in a community, you tend to fall into its ways; if the people you are fond of don’t go to shows, you don’t go with them, as Sam Goldwyn might say.

MR

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Morrie Ryskind

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In California, where I have been exiled for my sins, the theater, I regret to report, is only a minor incident in people’s lives. The graybeards tell me it wasn’t always thus: there was a time when San Francisco and Los Angeles were exciting show towns, and the youngsters got the same thrills from the theater as the kids of New York. But that’s no longer true. When the California teen-ager says “show,” he means a film; when he says “theater,” he means Grauman’s Chinese.

Not that we don’t get shows, and good ones. Los Angeles has the Biltmore, which gets a fair share of the road dramas, and the Philharmonic, where the enterprising Ed Lester puts on, with grace and distinction, the more popular musicals; Pasadena has its famed Community Playhouse; even Beverly Hills has a nearby theater. But you rarely hear anyone say excitedly, “We’re going to the theater Saturday night.” There are many of our friends who never see a legitimate attraction. And, when you live in a community, you tend to fall into its ways; if the people you are fond of don’t go to shows, you don’t go with them, as Sam Goldwyn might say.