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Crashing Through. This is one of those plays which tell how the other half lives, the other half in this case being the Pooles, a Nieuw Amsterdam-bound old family who are proud of family portraits, prouder still of family history or so much of it as has not been written in the past decade. Consuelo Poole (Rose Hobart) has a suppressed desire for a riveter who pumps bolts into the skeleton of a growing building near the Pooles' Manhattan home. One day, out of a steel-beamed sky, the riveter crashes through the Pooles' conservatory roof. Stunned by the fall, his astonishment is increased by the proximity of Consuelo. His way of expressing his daze is to say "Geez" many times (in throaty Theatre Guild English). There is, of course, an affair and there is a little accident. When Consuelo tells her twice-divorced mother and once-divorced father of her interesting condition, Father cries "Harlot!", Mother cries "Why didn't you tell me?" Only the dowager Mrs. Poole will accept erring granddaughter, riveting grandson-to-be, but Mrs. Poole's acceptance, one presumes, is sufficient for Manhattan. The veteran Henrietta Crosman does the fussbudgetty dowager and is featured in the play, but another saved the night. She is Rose Hobart.
Revolt. Author Harry Wagstaff Gribble (who wrote also that near masterpiece. March Hares) announces his theme as though he had himself discovered it. That the children of a fundamentalist preacher should become annoyed at their father's limitations is neither surprising nor interesting. Eventually the clergyman blows his brains out in an improbable manner.
One thing about the play is good. It has the solemnity of youth and its actors, notably Hugh Buckler, Anita Fugazy and Elizabeth Allen, play it with deep, serious sincerity.
Hello Yourself, patterned after Good News, is described as a "rah rah musical comedy," to distinguish it, presumably, from those which are merely raw. Its plot concerns a collegiate playwright whose play wins the play contest after he has been threatened with expulsion from college for helping a "pal" pay a gambling debt. There are many agreeable details in Hello Yourself; among them the hushed rhythms with which Jimmy Ray moves his feet in soft shoes; the wild noises of Waring's Pennsylvanians; and the antics of disjointed Dorothy Lee who might have been drawn by John Held Jr. and whose right stocking is deployed in wrinkles on her leg.
These Few Ashes. Kenneth Vail (Hugh Sinclair) lived idly in St. Moritz, Switzerland, had philanderer's blood of Alpine frigidity. There were four bothersome women, many bothersome creditors. He faked a death, eluded the creditors, could not elude one blonde (Natalie Schafer). But by that time his Wood was rather Italian. Playwright Leonard Ide uses the episodic development with flashbacks lately popularized by Novelists Wilder & Bromfield. The second episode, with Ralph J. Locke as a French husband whose adjustment to his wife's infidelity shows skilled amorous economics, is the funniest. Otherwise the froth refuses to bubble.