$6.60 Comedian (See Cover)
From the shadowed haven of the wings, the stage of Broadway's Mark Hellinger Theater looked as big and lonely as a desert at midday. Its barren boards reflected a fierce, mote-filled glare from banked and blazing floodlights, and out beyond it, in the hushed cavern of the theater, the audience waited like a beast in its den—multi-headed, thousand-eyed, impatient and menacingly silent. It was a terrible place for a ballplayer to find himself on the eve of the World Series.
Nightly, last week—as he has since mid-July—a chunky, middle-aged man in the road uniform of the New York Giants strode bravely out into that awful illumination. His flannel livery (a hand-me-down formerly worn by none other than Giant Second Baseman Eddie Stanky) was as genuine as a Spalding label. So were his cleated shoes, his tilted cap and his shambling, plate-bound walk. It was hard not to believe he was some weathered stray from the Polo Grounds who would presently wheel, find himself in the wrong park, and bolt for the dugout.
Instead, the old ballplayer disintegrated, subtly but suddenly, into a jerky, rubber-faced caricature of all the rough diamonds of the diamond since the days of Shoeless Joe Jackson. Something seemed to go wrong with his eyes, and he was seized, in plain view of all, with electric charges of wild vigor, wild friendliness and wild anxiety. He emitted a hoarse, gobbling cry. The audience, instantly enslaved, gave one seal-like bark of obedient laughter and then bathed him in 20 seconds of delighted applause. Oldtime Funnyman Bert Lahr (Hot-Cha!, George
White's Scandals, The Wizard of Oz, Du Barry Was a Lady), back as a Broadway comic for the first time in seven long years, was making his entrance in the hit revue, Two on the Aisle.
Quick Change Artist. The baseball bit is just the warmup for Lahr's night's work. In Two on the Aisle he has the support of a new Broadway sensation: a glittering, full-blown beauty named Dolores Gray, whose presence, style and big, happy voice make the revue's less-than-distinctive music sound far better than it is. Paris-born Ballerina Colette Marchand reveals one of the Continent's sexiest pairs of legs, sheathed in provocative black silk stockings. But it is bald, big-nosed, wild-eyed Bert Lahr who carries the show, provides it with tone, personality, guts and laughter and nightly fills the big house (1,527 seats) to bulging capacity.
In the 140-minute span of Two on the Aisle, he sweats through 19 costume changes. Aided by his dresser and three assistants, who stand just inside the curtain and peel costumes from him in onion-like layers, he gives a dizzying exhibition of that half-forgotten art, the quick change. He leaves the footlights as Captain Universe, a panicky Superman who wears an aerial on his head, slips out through the curtain again as a clown, dives back to reappear almost instantly as a cross-eyed gaucho, and then—encased in a gown which is snapped around him by a body-hugging steel spring—dodders into view as Queen Victoria.