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| Dorothy Loudon, Marian Hailey, Myrna Loy, Jan Miner, Kim Hunter, Rhonda Fleming, Mary Louise Wilson. (Photos: Friedmnn-Abeles.) |
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| Jan Miner, Rhonda Fleming, Marian Hailey, Kim Hunter, Alexis Smith. |
THE WOMEN [Dramatic Revival]
A: Clare Booth Luce; D: Morton DaCosta; S: Oliver Smith; C: Ann Roth; L: John
Gleason; P: Jeremy Ritzer and Joel Key Rice i/a/w John W. Merriam and Milton
Moss; T: Forty-sixth Street Theatre; 4/25/73-6/17/73 (63)
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Myrna Loy, Leora Dana, Elizabeth Perry.
|
Clare Booth Luce’s
1936 smash hit, about a bevy of bitching Park Avenue beauties, was greeted
mildly as a piece of camp nostalgia for its period costumes, décor, and
wisecracks. Its episodic, soap-operaish plot and glamorous characters were now
too clichéd and familiar, and its one-time ribald peek at what women say in the
privacy of other women seemed anti-feminist in a decade immured in the rhetoric
of Women’s Lib. Lifelike and laugh-provoking only sporadically, The Women served chiefly to offer an
assembly of flashy, well-dressed roles for a number of one-time stage and screen
stars.
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| Dorothy Loudon, Marian Hailey. |
Morton DaCosta’s
direction and the sets and costumes, respectively, of Oliver Smith and Ann Roth (still at
today!), captured the mid-30s ambience with accuracy and spirit.
The many scene changes were smoothly accompanied by period pop music. Actresses
picked out by most reviewers for were Alexis Smith as Sylvia, Kim
Hunter as Mary, Dorothy Loudon as Edith, Jan Miner as the Countess De Lage, and
Mary Louise Wilson as Nancy. Others in the very large cast, which required doubling from several actresses, included former movie icons Myrna Loy, as Mrs. Morehead, and Rhonda Fleming, as Miriam Aarons.
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| Rhonda Fleming, Jan Miner, Alexis Smith. |
Of the play itself, Walter Kerr’s remark is
representative: “Hail, and so far as I am concerned, farewell.”
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| Polly Rowles, Jan Miner. |
The entire cast, it
should be noted, received the Outer Critics Circle Award.
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| Myrna Loy, Kim Hunter. |
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.
