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| Lauren Jones, Donald Pleasance. |
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| George Rose, Donald Pleasance, Bud Cort. |
A short-lived black comedy about
a middle-aged gay criminal (Donald Pleasance) hiding out from the law by
dressing in drag. He maintains his ludicrous masquerade, under the name Mrs. Artminster, with the aid of a
potentially gay adolescent, Jerry (Bud Cort), who pretends that Mrs. Artminster is his mum. At the hotel in which they hole up is a prissy hotel
manager, Mr. Booker (George Rose), who eyes the youth lasciviously, and a sexy Black maid, Janice (Lauren Jones), who soon becomes the object of the criminal’s attentions. In
the end, Mrs. Artminster removes his female attire and Jerry chooses to turn
transvestite, perhaps with the intent of acting his accomplice’s daughter.
The “uneven and
erratic” comedy was “more murky than black,” thought Clive Barnes, and its plot
and character development “hopelessly obscure,” added Walter Kerr. “The story
is more ridiculous than amusing,” said Barnes, and Brendan Gill stated that the
would-be farce was “an ugly and unpleasant amalgam of Joe Orton and Agatha
Christie.” Douglas Watt, however, raved, calling the play “A wildly funny
suspense farce, brilliantly set forth.”
English actor Donald
Pleasance was nominated for a Tony as Best Actor for what Barnes called “a
virtuoso performance.”
Do you enjoy Theatre’s Leiter Side? As you may know,
since New York’s theatres were forced into hibernation by Covid-19, this blog
has provided daily posts on the hundreds of shows that opened in the city, Off
and on Broadway, between 1970 and 1975. These have been drawn from an unpublished
manuscript that would have been part of my multivolume Encyclopedia of
the New York Stage series,
which covers every show, of every type, from 1920 through 1950. Unfortunately,
the publisher, Greenwood Press, decided it was too expensive to continue the
project beyond 1950.
Before I began offering these 1970-1975 entries, however, Theatre’s
Leiter Side posted over 1,600 of my actual reviews for shows from 2012
through 2020. The first two years of that experience were published in separate
volumes for 2012-2013 and 2013-2014 (the latter split into two volumes). The
2012-2013 edition also includes a memoir in which I describe how, when I was
72, I used the opportunity of suddenly being granted free access to every New
York show to begin writing reviews of everything I saw. Interested readers can
find these collections on Amazon.com by
clicking here.
Next up: The Wiz.
