Broadway: Contracted Circle

As sentimental occasions go, this one was only slightly more nostalgic than a session in night court. To honor the 50th anniversary in the theater of Actress Peggy Wood (Bittersweet, Blithe Spirit), ANTA last week collected round her most of the remaining members of the much-chronicled Algonquin Round Table. The late great wits were missing, of course—Alexander Woollcott, Franklin P. Adams, Robert Benchley, Herman Mankiewicz—and, significantly, the reunion was held not at the old rear-center table in the Rose Room of the Algonquin but in the grand ballroom of Manhattan's Hotel Edison, five blocks and 90 light-years away. The most...