After a couple of months of trying to please audiences, the Cambridge Summer Theatre has apparently at last given vent to a long-suppressed ambition, and is now presenting a show in which the actors have a gay time for themselves, without paying too much attention to anyone else. "Ten Nights in a Barroom" has Mary Barthelmess droning "Father, Dear Father, Come Home With Me Now"; it has Robert Perry hopping around like an 1890 model of Danny Kaye; and it has a weird conglomeration of characters and specialty acts. These vary widely in appeal, but they have one thing in common: everybody behind the footlights has a whale of a good time out of them. The audience isn't quite so lucky.

"Ten Nights in a Barroom" fall hardest where it should have shone brightest. The specialty numbers--especialty those of old-timer Vic Faust, a toothless Al Smith with a hangover--click beautifully. But the attempts of the rest of the cast to pile on the old-fashioned melodrama with a trowel fall pretty flat. They use restraint where hamming is called for; and they don't even give the villain-hissing audience a fighting chance to display its wares. A livelier paced direction, with more emphasis on the exists and entrances that give blood-and-thunder its special quality would have helped immeasurably.

Dunlay and Morgan, a pair of agile tumblers, and the aging exuberance of Vic Faust outshadow anything that the non-burlesque-minded members of the cast are capable of, which may be a clue to the general weakness of the show. A little bit of the Old Howard touch might have served to get some of that excess enthusiasm over to the audience. As it stands, there's a free-for-all battle between the actors and the ticket-buyers. Either way, the customer loses.

You'll get some laughs out of the show. Your Mother will like parts of it even better, especially the Gay Nineties songs. But between laughs you're apt to get awfully bored wondering why and how twenty people on the stage can have so much fun while a couple of hundred in the audience are away in a corner with Morpheus. Margie Hart might have done some good, but not enough.