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Best acting and direction are reserved for the central story, concerning Tony Mako (Joseph Spurin-Calleia), a deadeyed, neurotic murderer who attends the show handcuffed to a detective because their train leaves late. Tony wants two things: to see the little man who betrayed him dying at his feet; then to drop dead himself. He gets both wishes. One or two of Small Miracle's side excursions are gratuitous and one or two are trite, but the tangled threads never slip out of the capable hands of Director George Abbott. The net effect is as pungent and authentic as the gunpowder smoke that clouds the stage in Act III.
Few minutes before the play's end a pert usher in a pert brown cap and close-fitting brown bodice utters her first and almost her last line: "Gee whiz, Mae was like delirious. She kept laughing and saying it was a big joke. Her baby's got no father." The pert usher is played by Jean Bellows, daughter of the late great Artist George Bellows.
Jean Bellows was born in Manhattan 19 years ago. Eight years ago Cinema Director Richard Boleslavsky saw her in an amateur play, gave her a part in The Scarlet Letter. Her professional stage début was at Glen Cove, L. I. in something called Episode Limited. Last year she played summer stock at Woodstock. This year she tried to get a job in Merrily We Roll Along by daily visit to the office of Sam Harris' general manager, leaving each day a slip of blue paper bearing information about Jean Bellows. Not until the tenth slip did she mention that she was George Bellows' daughter. Of her father she once said: "I'm his best work of art." Her inconspicuous appearance in Small Miracle is her first in Manhattan.
The Distaff Side (by John Van Druten; Dwight Deere Wyman and Auriol Lee, producers). This quiet study of womanly nobility serves chiefly to break the monotony of dirty but dull plays which all but engulfed the Broadway stage last month. In it Sybil Thorndyke, Dame Commander, Order of the British Empire, returns for the first time in 24 years to the U. S.
Dame Sybil in The Distaff Side is the keystone of an upper middle-class family of women. To her ancient and churlish mother (Mildred Natwick) she shows unremitting forbearance. To her fretful and uncertain sisters and daughter she imparts a philosophy distilled from long and loving communion with her late husband. One by one problems are solved. The daughter (Viola Keats) leaves the man who can further her ambitions for the man she loves. One sister (Estelle Wynwood) foregoes an unseemly dalliance, returns to the old romance that time has almost staled. The other sister (Viola Roache) finds it easier to accept the un eventful round of housewifely existence In the end Dame Sybil prefers her own tranquil solitude to another marriage.
What keeps The Distaff Side from slip ping into mawkishness is Sybil Thorndyke who seems to imbue her acting with a extraordinary personal warmth and to make the play a cameo-clear portrait of a fine and gracious woman.