"January Thaw"

When "January Thaw" opened at the Colonial Theatre two nights ago, there were moments when the audience, with both cars cocked, could hear an option drop somewhere in the recesses of producer Mike Todd's entrepreneurial mind. There were other moments, though, when the comedy reached proportions laughable enough to obscure the tittering of an uninhibited twenty mule team.

For the hyper-sophisticated followers of bedroom comedy, this homely little story of a Connecticut-conscious New York family will hold only a few widely scattered delights: there is not much of the subtle word-play and tittilating sex undercurrent that were good for so may laughs in the comparable "Man Who Came to Dinner."

The family involved in this particular household dilemma doesn't contain the intrinsically comic characters so well remembered from those laugh-a-minute antecedents in the tradition of the zany famille and the trespasser on the hearth. Yet William Roos' adaptation of the Bollamy Partridge novel is bound to satisfy most of those who are willing to go along with a fairly original version of the old urban-rural conflict, despite the gaping holes left in the comic continuity by the playwright and director Ezra Stone, who will be remembered as Henry Aldrich in real life.

This is not smart, polished Big-City comedy, although it is tailored for the Broadway trade and consequently suffered before a Boston audience. In the same way that the provincial New Yorker (the mag where you find W. Gibbs and S. J. Perelman) appeals to, among others, a certain tweed-and-fiannel set, this story of a back writer's family which attains its dream of a colonial home in the country (social suicide if it's not in Connecticut) is obviously meant to amuse the plethora of New Yorkers whose goal is to commune with Connecticut nature.

Most of what acting is required is adequately handled by Helen Carew and Charles Middleton as the wife and her farmer, any by Charles Burrows, in the only true comic characterization, as Uncle Walt, the perennial senile hick, The rest of the cast waits of the plot to thicken an occasionally jell into a laugh. There are more than the usual number of chuckles and a few that make you rock.