For weeks Broadway had buzzed with rumors that Playwright Moss Hart, who is being psychoanalyzed, would bring to town a Freudian musical play—a play that would startle the theatre as Doctor Sigmund himself once startled the hospital. Then Broadway stopped buzzing and began to huzzah, for last week Producer Sam Harris delivered Moss Hart's Lady in the Dark, a $130,000 baby.
Moss Hart's play idea is 18-carat. A hard-working editress of a fashion magazine, unhappy despite her enviable job and a devoted married lover, goes to get herself psyched. With that the play dissolves into a psychoanalytical circus with four revolving rings. The scene shifts from the psychoanalyst's office to the Allure office, to the young lady's dreams, and back again. Playwright Hart puts anything on the stage that he wishes—a love affair, sophisticated neuro-drama. fashion parades, farce, musical dream fantasias. And the lovely editress learns that she really wants to be less editorial and more seductive, to love not the married man but a cocky young charmer.
The play is neither quite so good as the idea nor so breath-taking as Broadway's swoon over it. Its dream fantasias are much less outlandish than the dreams any psychoanalyst might encounter in a day's work, sometimes lack sparkle, occasionally grow flatulent. But the whole production, spinning from reality to its not too fantastic reveries on four revolving stages, is lovely to look at and delightful to hear. It has one dream of glamorous evening blue, another gilded dream of an Oriental fairy tale, a glittering dream of a circus that turns into a mild nightmare. It has blandishing music, including a poignant song My Ship, by the German refugee composer Kurt Weill, who scored the productions of The 3-Penny Opera and The Eternal Road] and droll lyrics by Ira Gershwin such as:
The mister who once was the master of two
Would make of his mistress his Mrs.
But he's missed out on Mrs. for the mistress is through
What a mess of a mishmash this is!
Lady in the Dark has swarthy Victor Mature, latest in Hollywood's series of almost outrageously beautiful young men, who appears in every costume the feminine audience could wish, from breech clout to dress suit. Prepossessing young Macdonald Carey is the editress' eventual sweetheart. And Danny Kaye is very funny as a pansy fashion photographer who in true Cecil Beatonish style photographs a suit of armor with a blue chiffon scarf wrapped around its metal neck and stuffed doves perched on its shoulders. In the circus dream he scores the comic hit of the show with a jabberwockian song consisting entirely of the names of Russian composers.
But the secret of the show's success was given away by the raves of Manhattan's critics over its heroine. Said Richard Watts Jr. (New York Herald Tribune): "Lady in the Dark demonstrates with fine conclusiveness that Miss Gertrude Lawrence is the greatest feminine performer in the theatre." Wrote sobersided Harvardman Brooks Atkinson (Times): "As for Gertrude Lawrence, she is a goddess: that's all." John Mason Brown (Post) merely referred to her personality as "a welcome substitute for the Life Force.''