The Pleasure of His Company (by Samuel Taylor, with Cornelia Otis Skinner) is the first suavely managed drawing-room comedy in several seasons. With Actress Skinner's help, Playwright Taylor—on whose shoulders, more than anyone else's, has fallen the opera cape of the late Philip Barry—has contrived a bright tale of the prodigal father who, turning up for his daughter's wedding, turns everything around him upside down. And Cyril Ritchard, on whose shoulders have fallen both acting the prodigal and directing the play, has added greatly to the gloss.
Actor Ritchard plays an eternal playboy, a gleeful, middle-aged enfant terrible, an international charmer and flirt. When he descends on the correct San Francisco world in which his daughter lives with her mother and stepfather, and his own glamour puts the girl's serious young ranchman fiancé in the shade, the wedding bells begin to grow faint. For father's ideal of enjoying every real or sham pleasure goes to daughter's head like champagne. Simultaneously, the blood rushes to the ranchman's, and he denounces father's wastrel charms in ringing tones. After that, the play gets a bit shaky—and talky—what with having to cast its vote for either irreproachable dullness or irresponsible dash. In the end, daughter goes off for a before-the-wedding whirl with her fermented father—presumably as a way of eating her cake and having it, too, or of becoming so well fed with cake as to want only bread and cheese thereafter.
Drawing-room comedies, like drawing-room furniture, tend to be fragile and spindly, and with heavy handling The Pleasure of His Company might easily crash to bits. Happily, the authors have a feeling for tone, and have made the talk—half insulting and half elegant—a nice blend of spit and polish. The Donald Oenslager set is stylish. And with the help of a pleasant cast—Co-Author Skinner, Walter Abel, Charlie Ruggles, Dolores Hart, George Peppard—Cyril Ritchard has carried things farther. Acting papa, he has the grace and precision of a lithe figure skater; directing the play, he keeps things high in the air, like a skillful balloonist.
The Golden Six is Off-Broadway Maxwell Anderson and it is badly off the beam. The contemporary theater's most avid creator of historical drama, Playwright Anderson this time has swooped down on Rome during the last years of Augustus, when the Emperor and his powerful wife Livia (Viveca Lindfors) look forward to a continuing family empire, while most of the family prospects are shown scheming backward to a republic. Proffering history in great swigs and histrionics in huge gobbets, the play staggers and plunges on through a brace of reigns, amid dedicated and degenerate heirs, with Livia's the hidden, misdirecting hand.