Junior Miss

Junior Miss (1941), a comedy by Jerome Chodorov and Joseph Fields. [Lyceum Theatre, 710 perf.] Thirteen‐year‐old Judy Graves ( Patricia Peardon) has seen too many movies and believed them all. Being an overimaginative child, she convinces herself that her father ( Phillip Ober) is having an affair with his boss's daughter, Ellen ( Francesca Bruning), and that her Uncle Willis ( Alexander Kirkland) is a reformed criminal. To set matters right, she and her friend, Fuffy Adams ( Lenore Lonergan), determine to mate Willis with Ellen. None of this sits well with Ellen's father, J. B. Curtis ( Matt Briggs), for with every move, Judy and Fuffy seem to make matters worse. Things return to normal only when Judy finds herself about to have her first date. She is now a young lady, a junior miss, with her own problems to work on. Greeted by Brooks Atkinson as “a harumscarum antic and a darlin' play,” the Max Gordon production was one of the first shows, at a time when the draft was taking many men and women were employed in the war effort, to use younger female talents as principals and older performers in support. The comedy was based on short stories by Sally Benson, which had appeared in The New Yorker.