THE STORY: As described by John Chapman in the New York Daily News, the play “is an artfully deliberate combination of the legends of Graustark and the writings of George Sokolsky. In it Lunt and Fontanne are a vaudeville combo doing a mind-reading act, and their bookings have carried them as far as Prague, Czechoslovakia, in late 1948. They are just in time for the upsurge of the Communists and the purported suicide of Jan Masaryk, and for a pleasant while it looks as though they’d never get out of Prague alive…the result is a charming, winsome comedy.” The mind-reading duo—the Great Sebastians—have been friends of Jan Masaryk, and had lunch with him the day before his death. The new government in Czechoslovakia asks them to say publicly that Masaryk had been depressed and unhappy about his actions as head of the former government, and when the Sebastians refuse to do this, they are in trouble. They are hired to do their mind-reading act at the home of a Communist official who hopes to use them to uncover a traitor to his government; this backfires, and shortly they find themselves prisoners, with their life savings—in the form of a valuable postage stamp—in the hands of the enemy. After many ingenious intrigues an escape is, of course, managed (for this is a comedy) and even the postage stamp is retrieved, and the Sebastians dash for the border, carrying with them a reformed Communist who’s decided he would prefer life outside the Iron Curtain.
“A delightful show.” —New York Post.
