The Theatre: New Plays in Manhattan: Sep. 23, 1940

Hold On to Your Hats (music & lyrics by Burton Lane & E. Y. Harburg, produced by Al Jolson & George Hale). Al Jolson has an anxiety complex. He is afraid that audiences will not like him. Last week he was reassured. After a nine-year stay in Hollywood, where his light was dimmed by the glare of kliegs on more popular faces, he returned to Broadway in a burst of triumph, was prodigally welcomed by a first-night crowd undismayed by an $8.80 top. The vehicle that brought Jolson back to the boards was a rowdy, expansive, old-fashioned musicomedy, with a book so improbable that it could be abandoned at pleasure without interrupting a walloping fine evening.

The thin thread of continuity that runs through Hold On to Your Hats is spun of the same stuff that has gone into most theatrical satires on radio. A timid aerial star known as the Lone Rider is enticed to a Western dude ranch, confronted with real bandits who scare the chaps off him until just before the finale, when he gets the drop on them all. Jaunty at 54, still tops at putting over a song or a story, Jolson gallops triumphantly through the part of the Lone Rider, accompanied by a whole rodeo of able talent.

Droll is the boisterous, pratt-fall comedy of Guernsey-bosomed, muskellunge-mouthed Martha Raye; hilarious the portrayals of Concho, the Lone Rider’s Indian chum, by flap-eared, long-nosed Bert Gordon (Radio’s “Mad Russian”), whose accent is as thick as borsch with sour cream. Filling in for Ruby Keeler, who left the company in Chicago when ex-Husband Jolson’s ad-libbing got in her hair, neatly turned Eunice Healey steps with precision through a show-stopping tap.

Elegantly costumed by Raoul Pene du Bois, Hold On to Your Hats has plenty of fine dancing, if few memorable tunes. Best of the lot: There’s a Great Day Coming, Manana, The World Is In My Arms. To wind up his show, Jolson abandons Composer Lane’s score, whips into Mammy, Sonny Boy, Swanee, April Showers, many another ballad that he plugged in the ‘203. Kneeling, rolling his eyes, bleating the old speakeasy classics, Jolson manages by curtain time to draw a warm bath of Broadway nostalgia that would drown even Billy Rose.

Jupiter Laughs (by Dr. A. J. Cronin, produced by Warner Bros.). In his first play, Dr. Cronin (Hatter’s Castle, The Citadel) dwells moodily on the hoary conflict between science and religion. Prime ingredients of his dramatic formula: an agnostic young medico who swears and leches, a lady physician who loves the Lord.

If Dr. Cronin’s protagonists are standard stock, the rest of his cast is even more so. Painfully familiar are the kindly old doctor who plays solitaire, the desiccated matron in black who hatches plots, the wife of the sanatorium’s chief who likes to have her virtue sullied by the hero of the piece. Reasonably well acted, Jupiter Laughs could be diagnosed as a sad case of dramatic leukemia.