by: Emery Wister

Wasn't it just a few years ago that the motion picture version of "The Moon Is Blue" caused a sea of red faces and threw the industry into a panic with its frank talk of sex and modern morals?

How times change. The Country Dinner Theater's production of this play is calculated to do nothing but make people laugh. No offense was given or taken at the show staged last night.

"The Moon Is Blue" is a good and witty play by F. Hugh Herbert. It was, perhaps, a little ahead of its time when it was first written, but times have caught up with it and it provides a good mirror of today's moral standards and mores.

There are times when the play is a little slow but the drag is never too long. The cast is very good, particularly the lead, Candy Azzara. She has all the equipment to be the giddy one she portrays. She brings a little of Joanne Woodward to the show as she plays the professional virgin who falls in love with the young architect.

They meet on the Empire State Building roof. They go to his apartment for dinner. It all seemed innocent enough, but you'd never get her father and the father of the architect's former girl friend to believe it. Both come to the apartment during the long evening, and the latter father, a gay old rogue, even asks the girl to marry him. That complicates things even more.

ALAN RACHINS, a strikingly handsome lad, plays the young man and Hugh Cameron the gay old blade. Cameron, displaying a fine English voice is particularly good. But it's Miss Azzara's show. She makes it hum.

"It's better to be pre-occupied with sex than occupied," she says. And she makes you believe it. Better still she makes you think she believes it.