Theatre

If there is anything very original left to add to the case study of that wizened theatrical stand-by, the whore with a golden heart, Paul Osborn doesn't get around to saying it in his dramatization of Richard Mason's best-seller, The World of Suzie Wong. This is the occasionally touching story of a Chinese girl who was had at the age of 13 and who compounds her woe as a part-time resident of a Hong Kong brothel known as the Nam Kok Hotel. Because Suzie's soul is Pure, her heart is never in her work. She falls in love with a high-minded and innocent young painter, but she continues to lie down on the job nevertheless. The idea of espousing a prostitute gives the young man pause throughout the play, until the very end when he says the hell with it and takes his beloved in his arms. France Nuyen as Suzie is a succulent egg roll indeed, and is heart and shoulders above her stereotyped role. William Shatner as her Canadian lover, and Ron Randell and Sarah Marshall as a couple of Occidental bystanders, perform earnestly against odds which mount as the play progresses. More than any other factor, it is the lush, exotic production that has made Suzie a success. Jo Mielziner has designed the show's flamboyant sets, and director-producer Joshua Logan charges his stage with a riot of giggling girls, sly Orientals and foot-loose sailors on shore leave. Maybe the play isn't the thing, after all. At the Broadhurst Theatre, 235 West 44th Street, NYC.

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Playwright Harry Kurnitz, in Once More, With Feeling, gives the back of his hand and the best of his wit to the fringe folk and professionals in the world of highbrow music. His hero -- played by Joseph Cotten as if he were happier in Hollywood -- is a longhair conductor who shatters an average of six batons and one fiddle per rehearsal, generally over the head of the first violinist. As the curtain goes up, these temperamental tizzies have done the conductor out of all future bookings in important cities -- with the exception of Chicago, where the symphony directors will give him another chance, provided his estranged wife comes along to keep his choler down. Estranged wife says OK, but for reasons of her own: the two of them had lived in sin for 15 years, and now she wants to marry the maestro so she can get a divorce and then marry a portly college president. The plot is predictable from the beginning; but Kurnitz' dialog is as glib and punchy as any being written for the theatre today. Except for a lull when love sneaks in, he clocks a guffaw every 60 seconds. Arlene Francis, as the music master's saner half, handles her share of the nifties with charm and aplomb, even when making a brief appearance at the wrong moment in the top half of Cotten's pajamas. But the way things turn out, the cream of the quips goes to Walter Matthau, who, as the conductor's frazzled manager, manages to take the play away from the stars. See it. At the National, 41st St. west of 7th Ave., NYC.

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In The Pleasure of His Company, Cyril Ritchard -- an actor doubling as director -- overcomes the initial handicap that is automatically imposed on any stage character who is described as devastatingly charming as a build-up to his entrance. "Go ahead and be devastatingly charming!" growl the skeptics in the audience. Ritchard comes on and is. He's Biddeford "Pogo" Poole, the international sybarite and big-game hunter who returns to San Francisco after an absence of 15 years to attend his daughter's wedding. Pogo's daughter, Dolores Hart, is girlishly agog at her father's advertised charm, his ability to order a six-course dinner in French, and his Technicolored tales about faraway places; but Cornelia Otis Skinner, as his former wife, and Walter Abel, as her second husband, take his vaunted charm with a grain of salt and 10 grains of aspirin. Pogo in turn develops a desire to have his daughter provide charming solace for his fading middle years. Instead of admitting that he is lonely, he rationalizes that the girl is too young to settle down forever with George Peppard, the steady young rancher of her choice. He offers her a year in Paris, the Riviera and the enchanted isles of Greece and, as the curtain falls, father and daughter are heading East to the sunrise. This is a thin and trickly story that could be a dubious soap opera in the wrong hands. But Samuel Taylor and Cornelia Otis Skinner have written dialog that is consistently urbane and amusing, and the over-all performance is first rate. Pleasure, in short, is a pleasure. At the Longacre, 220 West 48th Street, NYC.