Theater: New Play in Manhattan, Apr. 21, 1941

The Night Before Christmas (by Sidney Joseph & Laura West Perelman, produced by Courtney Burr) is not a bedtime story. It is a mottled Sing Sing folk tale of a silver-haired confidence man past his prime and a slop-house plug ugly who pair up to crack a bank vault for Christmas. They buy a tired Manhattan luggage shop next door to the bank and start tunneling. Obstructed by unwanted customers, garrulous neighbors, former penmates, they dynamite, not the vault, but a nearby cafeteria, while Santa Claus stuffs their stocking with a cop.

The screwball wit of S. J. Perelman strangely enough fails to make this wacky plot rock his audience back on their seats with the clanky shock of his offstage writings. The play’s isolated episodes, bald-faced gags, screwy curtains are sometimes hilarious, but they fail to bind together into effective farce.

Eight years ago, on their honeymoon, the Perelmans wrote another play, All Good Americans, which failed to come off. Later they collaborated on the script for Ambush, one of 1939’s best pictures, and Mr. Perelman gagged the best of the Marx Brothers’ films. His best book (of four) was his first, Dawn Ginsbergh’s Revenge (1929). On its jacket was the blurb: “This book does not stop at Yonkers.” The Night Before Christmas does.