There can be no resisting the P. T. Barnum quote about a sucker being born every minute unquote: panned by even the most sugary-sweet of Boston's drama critics, a cheap-and not even bawdy-play starring a girl with exaggerated features is filling the Wilbur quite comfortably this week.
The girl is, of course, Chili Williams, former Conover model, polkadotted pin-up, and current object of Harvard publicity men's attention, and the play is called "Bigger Than Barnum." It is not a good play, and it will not go to New York.
Never rising above its environment, the Fred Rath and Lee Sands farce is about a couple of Coney Island tin-horns, Benny Baker and Sid Melton, who whitewash an elephant and pass him off, in the disapproved carnival style, as a sacred and genu-wine Indian white pachyderm. Things get more elaborate, but the plot is never much thicker than the coat of whitewash.
Miss Williams' part is simple, but it requires little more than her unpolka-dotted presence to explain both the title of this dismal production and its attraction to Boston's throngs.
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