When Mayor Curley ordered some revisions in "Flamingo Road" (on the ground that it was "an affront to the good people of Boston during the Lenten season"), there were plenty of good people of Boston who thought. His Honor had ulterior motives in discrediting the play. About the only thing noteworthy in the new Rowland Stebbins production is that Curley's critics are probably right: "Flamingo Road" is full of the sort of dirty Southern politics that some people say is paralleled in Boston.

"Flamingo Road" is mostly about a fat man named Titus Semple (Francis J. Felton) who happens to be sheriff of Petersburg, Florida, and has comfortably got himself into a position where he can run the politics of the town. He knows all about everybody in town, the way sheriffs do in small towns, and he's got the goods on everybody: Act I shows that.

Act II forgets it and gets to talking about a stray cat from a carnival pitch, a good-looking girl, with a hard voice, named Lane Ballou (Judith Parrish). She gets involved in Semple's machinations and winds up first in the country prison farm, then in the local house of ill repute. The girl's part is not well played, and accenting it makes "Flamingo Road" frequently border on standard melodrama.

But the quiet, genuine political talk--completely lacking in the usual ponderous phrases--gives "Flamingo Road" an accuracy which, with its background is quite appealing.

Down in Florida, where votes are bought and sold just like everywhere else, there are always "fat old men trying to keep things going good." Robert and Sally Wilder, the authors, have characterized the broad lines of grass-roots deviltry with conviction, if not with the best of form.

Its settings are attractive, its minor characters well drawn. With some blue pencilling in the second act, and perhaps a change of cast in the spot mentioned, the cast of "Flamingo Road" should find its tropical worsted and gabardine quite comfortable on Broadway in the summer time. jgt