Mr. Roberts (adapted by Thomas Heggen & Joshua Logan from Mr. Heggen's novel; produced by Leland Hayward) was a smash hit (advance sale: $400,000) weeks before it arrived on Broadway. Cased out of town, it was rumored to be out of this world. Happily, it is one of the better things in it: a good show superlatively produced; a rowdy, romantic, sometimes rather touching, sometimes uproariously funny wartime chronicle.
Laid on a Pacific cargo ship late in the war and far from the fighting, Mr. Roberts pictures a shipload of men worn down by lack of change, lack of women, lack of war. It suggests that boredom can be as tough on the nerves as bombardment. The only war the crew of the AK 601 can fight is against their captain, who makes life tough for others because life was tough for him. The crew's great hero is Lieut, (j.g.) Roberts, a "quiet guy who, while sweating to get transferred to the real fight, keeps in trim scrapping with the skipper. But when the captain refuses the crew a desperately needed shore leave, Mr. Roberts, to get it for them, promises to toe the line. The amazed and disgusted crew thinks that Mr. Roberts has ratted, only to find out the truth and worship him the more.
As a story Mr. Roberts isn't much—and isn't meant to be. It's as a human picture that it triumphs—a human picture in which frustration lives on delightful if not always convincing terms with farce. Tempers get sharper as everything else on the AK 601 gets duller. Denied the simpler masculine pleasures, guys cook up the most elaborate schoolboy pranks; the brinier the life, the earthier the lingo.
Feckless here & there as a show, Mr. Roberts is virtually flawless as a production. Co-Author Logan has directed it brilliantly; everything is timed just right; every character and gesture tells. As Mr. Roberts, Henry Fonda makes his first Broadway performance in eleven years a quietly memorable one. William Harrigan as the captain, David Wayne as a not-too-bright ensign, and above all Robert Keith as a worldly ship's doctor, are in excellent form.
Joshua Lockward Logan was agog with success last week: "Everything's been so wonderful I could choke. It's kind of an endless thing. It is really one of the biggest hits of our lifetime. I've never seen anything like this before in the theater. I practically choked. Why, a man said he'd write me a check for a million dollars for the screen rights. I wanted to accept just so I could see what a check for a million dollars looked like. But we want to do the thing ourselves in Hollywood some day, so we're not selling."
Author Heggen brought his successful short novel to Logan last August, after deciding that he didn't like his own stage version. For three months they hacked away at it together. Says Logan: "Nothing could stop it. It got up on its two feet and walked by itself." More accurately, 6 ft.-1 in., 200-lb. Josh Logan shoved the play into shape.
Director-Co-Author Logan was born 39 years ago "on the paved side of Texarkana." At eight, he saw his first theatrical production—a morality play "full of handmaidens personifying things like Beauty, Youth and Modesty. I think what really got me was seeing Flattery enter through a mirror."