Will Silk Stockings Run?

In New York's Imperial Theatre at 7:45 tomorrow evening, the curtain will rise on a new musical comedy entitled Silk Stockings. There will be a full house, of course--there is always a full house at Broadway openings when the play has been created by such big names a Feuer and Martin George S. Kaufman, Abe Burrows, Cole Porter, and Jo Mielziner. The aura of a big hit will be in the air.

Sprinkled among the first-nighters there will be a few people, however, watching the play with a theatrical sort of morbid curiosity. These few will have come not so much to see a new hit as to see exactly what ails a show that has twice postponed its Broadway opening, has experienced extensive revisions during a full twelve weeks of try outs, and has been formally disowned by the man still billed as it co-author, Silk Stockings, despite its big names and its tremendous $850,000 advance sale, has had more trouble to date than virtually any other musical in history.

The show's main problems have not, however, arisen from bad critical notices not yet, at any rate. Critics in such "try-out towns" as Philadelphia, Boston, and Detroit, the three cities where Silk Stockings has played to far, habitually write with one eye on Broadway; thus they hesitate to pan any show that seems even remotely capable of becoming a hit. Most of the pre-opening reviews of Silk Stockings, accordingly, have pointed out serious flaws in the production but refrained from condemning it as a whole. The play seems "jaded and faded and old and cold," said Cyras Durgin of the Boston Globe who then concluded, typically; "But it will do business!"

The preliminary reviews were deprecatory enough, nevertheless, to convince the producers that they had better keep Silk Stockings out-of-town until they remedied its major defects. Composer Cole Porter consequently has had to write six new songs to substitute into his score--a score which, despite a jukebox hit called "All of You," is still indisputably inferior to his previous successes. And the book, a parody on Soviet ways adapted from the famous Greta Garbo movie Ninotchka, has undergone so much scene-shuffling and rewriting at the hands of co-author Abe Burrows that at one point he eliminated the title song itself. Thus, whereas most musicals play four weeks in just one try-out city, Silk Stockings has played three months in three different locations. Names like Feuer and Martin have produced full houses all along, but the extended try-out runs indicate that Feuer and Martin themselves were somewhat less than confident about the show.

Yet many plays in the past have suffered from, and have eventually overcome, such problems as lukewarm reviews and extended revisions. What hit Silk Stockings in Boston of January 22 was something entirely new and unexpected. Under the headline: KAUFMANS DISOWN SILK STOCKINGS', the Herald reported how George Kaufman and his wife Leueen McGrath, co-authors of Silk Stockings, had just seen the show in Boston after several weeks of absence from the troupe withdrawing from the production. Kaufman has never made clear whether he did not like the show in Boston or simply thought that Abe Burrows had re-written it too extensively. Burrows' name, which was added to the bill at that time, has not hurt ticket sales, but news of the Kaufman's withdrawal has; even yesterday the show's press representative refused to talk about the incident.

Burrows himself, unlike the press agent, confesses that he is rather puzzled by the paradoxical history of Silk Stockings. After tomorrow night, however, neither he nor the agent will have to wonder say longer about the play's future. The fate of this enigmatic production will then rest squarely on the typewriters of seven equally enigmatic New York critics.