MID-SUMMER

Well, I never thought I'd ever see James Mason singing, soft-shoeing, and straw-hatting his way through old vaudeville routines. But this is precisely what he is doing this week in his Boston stage debut. He evidently had the same yen that Sir Laurence Olivier recently satisfied in John Osborne's The Entertainer; and what's more, both Mason's material and performance are superior to Olivier's.

Mason's vehicle on this occasion is Mid-summer, a sentimental comedy that had a short Broadway run in 1953, written by Vina Delmar (chiefly known for her serialized novels in women's magazines). The play is not very substantial; but it is at least competently written and, in this production, always engaging. The beginning, however, is unfocussed; and there are numerous evidences of obvious padding, where, for instance, characters quote poetry, the Declaration of Independence, the agnostic writing of Robert Ingersoll, and the roster of U.S. presidents, or occupy themselves in a spelling bee and an arithmetic problem.

The action, laid in a cheap lower Manhattan hotel room in 1907, centers about a down-and-out teacher (played by Mason) with a craving for the adventure and glamour of show biz; his wife (portrayed by Mason's wife Pamela), who wants him to settle down in "the little white house" and security of a teaching position on Staten Island; and their shockingly precocious nine-year-old daughter (winningly played by the Masons' own daughter Portland).

Mason's performance, over and above his adept vaudeville bits, is faultless--a suave and perfectly controlled one, such as we often get from the best British actors and have usually got from Mason himself in his many movies from Seventh Veil through Julius Caesar to Cry Terror. He doesn't falter vocally for a moment, even when at the same time he has to give himself a complete shave with a straight razor or don a shirt with separate collar and French cuffs.

Pamela is not so well suited to her role of the uneducated wife (which raised Geraldine Page to Broadway stardom): she speaks the English language far too beautifully. Her highly cultured accent would never be found in a woman who cannot even read. Still, it is a pleasure to listen to her diction.

The supporting characters in the play are pretty much two-dimensional types, but the members of the cast round them out as much as possible. Betty Bartley is the whiny-voiced dumb blonde who dresses flamboyantly and is glad to give herself to a portly, cigar-smoking gentleman of means (Jonathan Morris); she has the funniest lines in the show, and some of them are really a howl.

Douglas Deane is a polished song-and-dance man. And Edward Finnegan (remembered for his fine portrayal in The Potting Shed at this theatre last summer) makes the most of the clergyman shocked to find that the words of "the Great Agnostic" can issue out of the mouths of babes. Adele Thane (also here in two plays last summer) brings the vigor of Margaret Rutherford to the part of the indolent maid.

Paul Andor recreates his original Broadway role as Mr. Lenoir, the hotel-keeper, and speaks French with a good accent. As his wife, Suzanne Caubaye speaks a pseudo-French English that has too many Yiddish touches in it.

Harold J. Kennedy and Albert Penn have provided sure-handed direction on a suitably run-down set by Stuart Whyte. And someone deserves a program credit for Miss Bartley's outlandish costumes.