Arsenic & Old lAce - Center Stage

In the weeks following the 1941 New York premiere of Arsenic and Old Lace,
a series of mysteries and thrillers debuted on Broadway to considerably
less enthusiasm—earning them some choice and characteristic responses
from the critical choir. X
The Lady Who Came To Stay
Brooks Atkinson. New York Times,
January 3, 1941.
Eight O’Clock Tuesday
John Mason Brown. New York Post,
January 7, 1941.
McKay Morris was never more dead in
his life than when the curtain went up at
Henry Miller’s Theatre last night. There
he was stretched out on the floor of his
shadowy suburban library with a paper
knife thrust far into him, a man who had
breathed his last, the mortal remains of
Ivan Godden, a wretch who can be more
accurately identified as Ivan the Terrible.
But did Mr. Morris stay put? He did not.
Most assuredly he did not. Things like
that don’t happen in the theatre, at least
to such actors as Mr. Morris.
Brooks Atkinson. New York Times,
January 7, 1941.
When the curtain rises on the detective
drama…the corpse is already on the
floor. He is soon decently covered with
a blanket, although you can see the
blanket rise and fall, rise and fall with
the regularity of breathing—always a
nerve-wracking blemish in the acting of
corpses.
John Anderson. New York Journal
and American, January 7, 1941.
Inspector Wait grills [everyone] modestly
and gets them slowly but surely to tell
on one another and on themselves. At
the end, we know who killed poor Ivan,
even if we no longer care, and the one
bright promise of the evening is the
inspector’s assurance, at the very end,
that, hereafter, he’s going back to the old
methods of clues and fingerprints and
who was that alibi I saw you with at four
minutes past whatyoumaycallit.
First Stop to Heaven
Richard Lockridge. New York Sun,
January 6, 1941.
A number of intolerably quaint people
performed strange antics last evening at
the Windsor Theater. Mail carriers quoted
poetry, policemen distractedly wished
themselves back in Central Park, and a
building inspector, frenzied at finding
himself in so odd a gathering, twice fell
down a flight of stairs. This department
shared the inspector’s emotions, but was
denied his release.
Mr. and Mrs. North
Louis Kronenberger. New York
Newspaper “PM,” January 13, 1941.
After the drenching and lunatic laughter
of “Arsenic and Old Lace”, with its two
dozen variegated murders, “Mr. and Mrs.
North” cannot help seeming a touch
prosaic. Its mere brace of homicides seem,
by comparison, just routine incidents in
any nice young couple’s daily existence.
Sidney B. Whipple. New York World-
Telegram, January 13, 1941.
Mr. Davis’ play suffers, I think, from
the circumstances of its being the third
of a cycle of murder plays to arrive
in hurried sequence on Broadway, and
particularly from having followed the
cheerfully gruesome “Arsenic and Old
Lace” with its homicides in wholesale
lots. But if it lacks the comic impact of
that murder epidemic, it gains a great
deal in the understanding and charming
portraits of [its chief characters], the
Norths. In other words, I find the North
family more interesting and real…than
I do the strange situation into which the
authors have thrown them.
They are doing the best they can to
scare the innocent theatergoer at Maxine
Elliott’s Theatre. Using an old ghost
story…as his sourcebook, Kenneth White
has written a nightmare and Guthrie
McClintic has directed and produced
it as if he believed in it. [….] But if
he thinks that “The Lady Who Came
To Stay” is worth all the hard work
and skill that a good theatre production
requires, this column will have to beg to
be excused. It is a silly, maudlin piece of
willful adolescence that seems especially
malapropos in the modern world.
John Anderson. New York Journal and
American, January 3, 1941.
“The Lady Who Came To Stay”…is a
pretty depressing and somewhat sadistic
exercise in spook-a-boo drama by Kenneth
White designed to induce shudders and
chills. Instead, it merely left me cold, so
cold in fact that the sleety street seemed
a welcome relief.
John Mason Brown. New York Post,
January 3, 1941.
“The owly-hoots are out tonight” says Mrs.
Tuddlewinks in the nursery rhyme. And
so they were—in droves—at the Maxine
Elliott last night. For there…was…a ghostridden
melodrama by Kenneth White…in
which the three weirdest sisters known
to the drama since “Macbeth” died off
one by one and, by refusing to stay put,
kept more than their graves yawning
for the major portion of a silly
evening.
fake, he is sometimes too clever and
cynical at the expense of a serious play.
Tall, curly-haired John Mason Brown (Post)
is the youngest of the newspaper critics.
Probably the ablest all-round of the
lot, he combines journalistic dash with
analytical skill. With Anderson, he has the
highest critical boiling point.
Kindly, near-sighted Burns Mantle (News)
is, at 65, the oldest of the newspaper
critics. Nationally known for his annual
The Best Plays of 19—, he is often
sound, almost always dull. His best
advertisement is his trick of rating plays
by stars.
Slight, professorial Richard Lockridge
(Sun) is intelligent, fluent, sometimes
astute, curiously colorless.
Small, thin Sidney B. Whipple (World-
Telegram), Broadway’s newest critic,
wrote a life of Charles M. Schwab
which will remain locked in a
safe until Schwab dies. A
polysyllabic Pollyanna,
Whipple likes good
clean fun, loves good
clean seriousness,
is Broadway’s
defender of the
family, the fireside,
the flag.
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