This production was not up to the Broadway one. Bert Lahr had a lot of fun as the visitor from outer space, but lacked the polished hauteur that Cyril Ritchard brought to the role. Kenny Delmar (Fred Allen's Senator Claghorn, for those of you with long memories) could have used more of Eddie Mayehoff's bluffness in the part of the none-too-bright general who has trouble with anything bigger than the Army's laundry problems.

I never thought I'd ever see James Mason singing, soft-shoeing, and straw-hatting his way through old vaudeville routines. But that is precisely what he did in his Boston stage debut. He evidently had the same yen that Sir Laurence Olivier recently satisfied in John Osborne's The Entertainer; and what's more, both Mason's material and performance were superior to Olivier's.

Mason's vehicle was Vina Delmar's Midsummer, a sentimental comedy that had a short Broadway run in 1953. The play is not very substantial; but it is at east completely written, though the beginning is unfocussed and there are evidences of obvious padding.

The action centers about a down-and-out teacher (played by Mason) with a craving for the adventure and glamour of show biz; his wife (portrayed by Mason's wife Pamela), who wants him to settle down into the security of a teaching job; and their shockingly precocious nine-year-old daughter (played by the Masons' own daughter Portland).

Mason gave a suave and perfectly controlled performance, such as we often get from the best British actors and have usually got from Mason himself in his many movies from Seventh Veil through Julius Caesar to Cry Terror.

Pamela was not so well suited to her role of the uneducated wife (which raised Geraldine Page to Broadway stardom): she spoke the English language far too beautifully. Her highly cultured accent would never be found in a woman who cannot even read.

Basil Rathbone is an old pro; Geraldine Page is a young pro. These two stars, collaborating in Terence Rattigan's expertly written Separate Tables, provided the Boston Summer Theatre with its best show of the season.

Separate Tables is actually a brace of plays with the same locale--Table by the Window and Table Number Seven--each dealing with a different type of loneliness, and each, aside from the two leads, employing the same set of characters. There is plenty of humor, but the themes are basically serious.

The second play is the more important one. Citing it in a recent article in the New York Times the British author Stephen Spender said: "The way in which a talent can be damped down by success to the faintest squeak of social protest is shown (here) ... where the writer's plea for sympathy with the man who gets off with girls in cinemas is a pill covered under about sixteen layers of sugar." True, the play was originally intended as a dramatization of the actual case of a well-known British actor with a taste for young men. But the result, watered down though it be, still has a point; and Rattigan, with a sure ear for dialogue, makes it clearly and movingly.

Miss Page turned in consummate portrayals of the divorcee and the spinster (which Margaret Leighton attempted so inadequately in the pre-Broadway tryout here two years ago). Her performance in either play alone would have been an impressive achievement. But her ability to undergo such a transformation during intermission was almost uncanny. And this was much more than a change of costume, makeup and wig; she did it through her posture, gait, gesture, diction and other ways. Through extraordinary muscular control, she was able to change her whole repertory of facial contours from those of a stunning beauty to those of an uncomely nobody. Genius is not a word to be tossed about lightly; but Miss Page has unmistakable marks of genius. She has moments that are way beyond the reach of all but a few actresses.

Rathbone was effective in the second play, if not quite up to his Broadway predecessor, Eric Portman. He was, however not really at home in the first play. He is habitually cool, clean, clipped and polished; and it was clearly an effort for him to be awkward, slovenly, and impetuous. The two stars enjoyed an uncommonly fine supporting cast--better than the Broadway one, and better directed.

Faye Emerson and Murray Matheson starred in three of the nine one-acters that make up Noel Coward's Tonight at 8:30. They did well with Ways and Means, a bedroom comedy complete with burglar. But why did they omit the final line? Without it, the end fell flat. Hands Across the Sea is a plotless bit of mayhem, a three-minute joke extended to thirty. Shadow Play is a confused, stylized soap opera about a marriage on the rocks. It showed that the two stars ought not to sing in public; but it did provide a good final examination for the lighting technicians and stagehands.

Arnold Schulman's A Hole in the Head is a rather good addition to the corpus of laughter-and-tears drama. It is not a thesis play; nor is it a deep one. The author chose the just-plain-folks, people-in-the-house-next-door, it-could-happen-to-you genre, set within the framework of a specific middle-class cultural milieu--the sort that has tempted many American writers, with varying success, ever since Abie's Irish Rose.

In this instance, the milieu is Jewish. But Schulman, though a Jew, has presented it with restraint and avoided the easy temptation of exaggerating the Jewish elements.

Now it is true of most plays that some, if not all, of the characters undergo a big change by the time the curtain is rung down. Here, curiously, every character is just the same at the end of the play as at the start. Yet this does not yield a vacuum. Events do transpire; and the essential elements of conflict and suspense are not lacking.