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Wild Waves is a well-intended play about the fauna which infest a third-rate radio station belonging to the recent firecracker school of playwrighting that got underway about the time that Broadway was produced. As a portrait of the sort of station where the accompanist does his own announcing, where a befuddled Negro rings all the time-signals and most of the other work is done by one harried man, Wild Waves is novel and, according to oldtime radio folk, valid. Unhappily its author, Radio Dramatist William Ford Manley, has the notion that the source of rapid-fire comedy lies in the ability of each character to say the most boorish thing he can think of to every other character. As a result, Wild Waves is chiefly notable for displaying 45 of the most disagreeable people imaginable. There are definitely funny lines and situations, but since the line seems to be the unit of the playwright's thought, Wild Waves is hopelessly muddled as to motivation and plot. The many admirers of Osgood Perkins ( The Front Page, Uncle Vanya, The Wiser They Are) can only hope that he soon gets a better job, of which it would appear he will presently be in need.
There's Always Juliet. John Van Druten (Young Woodley) tells the tale of an English girl (Edna Best) and a young American (Herbert Marshall) who fall head-over-heels in love with each other at first sight. They have been acquainted only two days when he is called back to Manhattan to look after his architectural business. He offers marriage, and for the first time they sit down soberly and try to find out about each other. He has been wed before, divorced, has a child in Colorado. These revelations suddenly turn a carefree romance into a very serious, grown-up affair. They decide to cancel out the whole thing. But chance and another cablegram offer the two lovers a second opportunity. This time they embrace it.
Playwright Van Druten has presented his compassionate little comedy with extraordinary persuasiveness and grace. And he has taken occasion to seed his play, first produced in London, with good-natured transatlantic jibes calculated to tickle audiences on either side of the ocean.
No stranger to the U. S. stage, Edna Best was last seen in this country in Melo. Actor Marshall, her husband, was the wise and witty scientist, last year, in Philip Barry's Tomorrow & Tomorrow. Great Britain need not envy the U. S. its Lunts so long as the ingratiating Marshalls carry on. Third of There's Always Juliet's cast of four is May Whitty, a Dame of the British Empire. Impersonating a sort of female super-butler, she has found an infinite and amazing number of ways of saying her chief line which is "Yes, Miss."
Since it is British, amusing and concerned with a love affair, There's Always Juliet will inevitably be compared with uproarious Private Lives. Less noisy than Noel Coward's play, There's Always Juliet should not suffer by the comparison.