Word: paradiso
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...Hotel Paradiso, written 71 years ago by the once-famous and prolific Georges Feydeau with the collaboration of Maurice Desvallieres, is exceedingly standard and exceedingly French French farce. This means sex first, but not in the long run foremost. In such goings-on, slapstick and speed become a good deal more important than spice. The bed is only a prop; the actual objective is bedlam...
...Hotel Paradiso Bert Lahr is married to a battle-ax, and somehow gets out from under her thumb to seek sin with a beautiful blonde lady. In due course, for one reason or another, he and the lady, her husband's nephew and a lady's maid, the husband himself, and a family friend with four innocent golden-haired daughters, are all cheek-by-jowl or better in a Paris fleabag. Upstairs and down they scamper, in and out of rooms they dash, till the gendarmes come rushing in at the second-act curtain...
...entertainment, Hotel Paradiso is a bit in-and-out itself. The show has lively spurts and is attractively dotted with mad scenes. Osbert Lancaster's expertly ghastly sets are part of the fun, and the play's various set-tos are here and there funny. The whole evening is a brightly instructive exhibit of the mechanics of French farce; it is never quite an occasion of full-bodied merriment...
...being entirely right for it. His clowning has always a certain human appeal; his zany genius is rooted in character and a little disrupted by plot. His own timing is flawless, but too personal for pacing flat, stylized farce. He doubtless gives the play something extra. But if Hotel Paradiso lacks the sustained period-farce verve of last season's The Matchmaker, it may partly be because Lahr is not Ruth Gordon's equal as a center tent-pole, either in the sturdiness with which she held whole situations upright, or in the barbaric magnificence with which...
...programs listed one old reliable after another (Brahms's Lullaby, Una furtiva lagrima from L'Elisir d'Amore, O Paradiso from L'Africana), but the cheering listeners evidently were in the mood for chestnuts. The music was just what Gigli always sang best, and he showed traces of his old vocal glory: a refined moment of color, a liquid pianissimo phrase, a ringing high note. More often, the voice was thin, unsteady, and unmistakably 65 years...