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After a spell at Culver Military Academy, he went to Princeton, "so I could be in the Triangle Club." During his first summer vacation from Princeton, he joined a summer stock company that included Margaret Sullavan, James Stewart and Mildred Natwick, and he directed one play. In his senior year, he won a scholarship to the Moscow Art Theater, where he sat for eight months at the feet of the great Stanislavsky.
The Broadway hits Logan has directed include On Borrowed Time, I Married an Angel, Knickerbocker Holiday, Stars in your Eyes, Higher & Higher, Charley's Aunt, By Jupiter.
Since the war (in which he served as an Air Forces intelligence captain), he has directed three more—Annie Get Your Gun, Happy Birthday and John Loves Mary—all still running (next chore: directing Rodgers & Hammerstein's Tales of the South Pacific"). Josh deprecates his chain-explosion of successes: "It's hard to break in, but the moment you've had a success everybody wants you. There just aren't enough directors to go around."
The Old Lady Says "No!" (by Denis Johnston; produced by Richard Aldrich & Richard Myers, in association with Brian Doherty) followed John Bull's Other Island as the Dublin Gate Theater's second Broadway offering. A highly expressionistic fantasy first produced in 1929, it tells of an actor (Micheál MacLiammoir) who is accidentally knocked unconscious while playing Irish Rebel Robert Emmet (1778-1803) in a costume play. The rest of The Old Lady consists of the actor's delirious visions: he is still Emmet, but an Emmet wandering through the streets and pubs and literary gatherings of a decadent modern Dublin.
Plainly The Old Lady is a safire castigating Ireland's fiberless present by contrasting it with her heroic past. But possibly it is also a satire about an Ireland grown languid in the present from living too much in the past—an Ireland in which everyone is so busy acting a part that no one acts. All swift scenes and no sustained story, it flares up brightly one moment, falls flat the next, and its expressionism seems dated as often as daring. But the play has much Celtic freshness of language, and the smoothness born of playing it many times.