BEHIND THE SCENES

With the reappearance of "Gold in the Hills," the Stagers present a melodramatic finale to a successful season at the Peabody Playhouse. Probably their best show value was the production last week of Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur's "The Front Page." It seemed to me as I sat through the performance that Francis Grover Cleveland gave a much more interesting interpretation of Hildy Johnson than Pat O'Brien did in the motion picture. While some of the other players were not up to the standard set by the cinema, the whole impression was one of sustained action with the starkly worded dialogue landing in the audience's lap with the jolt of a steam ram. Which recalls the fact that "The Front Page" was not allowed to show in Boston under the regime of Censor Casey. Probably even now the Playhouse is the only place where it could run uncut and unmolested. I have an idea that, in the opinion of the city fathers, the souls of such dilettantes as journey down to Charles Street are not worth the saving.

The curious thing about the whole censorship situation is that an announcement that the Can-Can Shimmy Girls were to go on at Charles Street would very probably arouse censorial activity, while if certain bits of dialogue were transposed from "The Front Page" to the stage of the Howard Athenaeum, that venerable institution would be closed not for just a month, but always. From this we might draw a reaffirmation of the proverb "there's a time and place for everything." Primitive reportorial humor is just as acceptable in a newspaper play as hard swearing was in the dugout in "What Price Glory," as bed-room skits in a musical comedy, or scenes from a Turkish bath in Scollay Square; but each in its own place.

It may be that those in authority have decided that in lieu of the vanished pomps of yesteryear, the public is at least entitled to a few good belly laughs and for this reason are relaxing their vigil over our entertainment. If we can't afford to be decadent we can at least have our humor more rudimentary. There are abounding proofs that standards are becoming more liberalized. "Hot Pepper," a McLaglon-Lowe comedy coming to the University Theatre in the near future, is a good case in point.

Whatever the causes of this relaxation results point to the strengthening of the average conscience through more extensive practice.