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Amid outcries about freedom, characters die as if it were the last act of Hamlet; amid tirades against power, slave girls uncover and Caligula runs wild. If there is a unifying note in all this it is that the characters, whether male or female, slave or free, vile or virtuous, slain or spared, are orators one and all. So much oratory has its touches of eloquence, so much theatricalism its flashes of theater. But the play as a whole is lumberingly lurid, and Alvin Epstein's Claudius offers some adroit stammering that is more effective than anyone else's speech.
Once More, With Feeling (by Harry Kurnitz) is a farcical assault on the world of music, not unlike the author's skirmish, in Reclining Figure, with the world of art. The method is to let fly now at chicanery and now at sham, and in between to go in for shenanigans. The central figure is an egomaniac orchestra conductor who, from shattering his musicians' fiddles and his trustees' feelings, can hardly find an orchestra to conduct. On one side he is Blanked by a shameless manager who ten times a day tries to save the day with desperate lies, on the other by a wife who once saved it through charm. Now separated from the maestro, she wants a divorce so she can marry someone else; the litch is that she was not married the first time.
Playwright Kurnitz has a gift for amusing gags, and his play is sprinkled with hem. Here and there, it has a funny situation also; moreover, the manager beyond being show-stealingly played by Walter Matthau—is a juicy character, and not by accident. His rich, lowdown nature is right up Kurnitz' alley, which is Shubert with a touch of Tin Pan. In the world of music, as of art, Playwright Kurnitz remains Broadway to the core, He is not the only recent playwright whose treatment of a stylish professional world, by comparison with The Man Who Came to Dinner, for example, seems raspingly lacking in style. Once More, With Feeling has none of the stealthy purr-and-scratch of music-world wit; rascals are roughnecks, megalomaniacs commit mayhem, bull fiddles see red. There is not a touch of urbane caricature, it is all plebeian cartooning; and even on its own would be broad popular terms, the play has no real Broadway bounce.
George Axelrod's staging is lively, and Arlene Francis is high-spirited as the wife. Joseph Cotten's playing of the conductor is off key, but then the conductor himself seems outlandish.
Make a Million (by Norman Barasch and Carroll Moore) is a type of play that, given time, Broadway might well make a million of itself. The formula is a contraption that keeps a farcical, topical, more or less sexy idea whirling, brings on a character every 46 seconds, drops out a gag every 19, makes a hideaway of the men's room and a rumpus room of the office. Aspiring to pandemonium, the authors never fail of noise; left creatively penniless at the second-act curtain, they spend the third act kiting checks.