The Theatre: The New Season

By the first week in August the first ripples of a season’s flood of plays will break on Broadway. Some 300 plays have been proposed for production between August and the following April. Of these perhaps 150 will reach the Manhattan boards.

Mrs. Fiske will take a company of Ibsen’s Ghosts on tour. Particular attention will be given to University towns and educational institutions. The production may, but probably will not, come to Manhattan.

Ethel Barrymore will probably play a dramatization of John Erskine’s The Private Life of Helen of Troy.

Billie Burke, after several seasons’ absence, is due in a comedy called Pardon My Glove by Zoe Akins. Louis Wolheim will be in the troupe.

Lowell Sherman will play a presumably lurid fable called A Woman Disputed Among Men by Denison Clift.

Katherine Cornell will not act The Green Hat on tour. She is under contract to David Belasco to play a piece called The Desert adapted by George Middleton from the Spanish of Lorenzo Azerits.

Fanny Brice opens in September in a comedy by David Belasco and Willard Mack called Fanny. It is said to be a dramatization of her own shrewdly comic character and includes a few songs. Grace George is even now on tour in a modern comedy by Arthur Richman called Arlene Adair. It will enter the metropolis presently.

Fred Stone has a new musical show, cast in his traditional mold and called Criss-Cross. His able daughter, Dorothy, will sing and dance with him.

Beatrice Lillie, notable comic of Chariot’s Revue, deserts the English ranks to play in an American musical comedy called Bubbles. Vincent Youmans is writing the music.

Frank Craven will act in Home Again, a comedy by George Barr McCutcheon.

Ed Wynn is concocting a new revue which will enable him to exhibit his eccentric inventions and other items unfailingly amusing.

Frances Starr, absent for some time, returns in a piece by David Dorrance called The Shelf.

Otis Skinner, also a stranger recently on Manhattan stages, will be occupied with a revival of his most notable success, The Honor of the Family.

Nazimova has long been scheduled to act a Noel Coward comedy variously called Nadya and Souvenir.

Jane Cowl is tentatively involved with a French play called La Riposte, by one Nozaire.

Irene Bordoni will probably play Sacha Guitry’s Mozart, one of the signal success of the last Paris and London seasons. There is, however, a possibility that M. Guitry and his wife, Yvonne Printemps, will themselves come to the U. S. to act the piece.

Raquel Meller will be back again in October to give her program of songs. She may sing in a night club rather than a theatre. She will also act for Charles Chaplin in a motion picture about Napoleon. There is the barest of possibilities that Mr. Chaplin will act with her.

Jeanne Eagles, after four long seasons in Rain has been released from that play’s popularity at last. She will do a German success, Garden of Eden, adapted by Avery Hopwood.

Paul Robeson, Negro actor and singer of spirituals, will take the lead in a prize fight play by Jim Tully and Frank Dazy called Black Boy.

Walter Hampden, dean of actor managers since the death of Henry Miller, will continue at his own theatre in classic repertory, including Hamlet and Cyrano de Bergerac. He also promises a modern play or two.

Helen Hayes, who is making such a success in J. M. Barrie’s What Every Woman Knows will take the play on tour and late next season play the same author’s Quality Street.

Eugene O’Neill’s unproduced manuscripts are various. Those most likely to reach the stage this season are a dramatization of the book of Job, a play called Marco’s Millions, and a third called Lazarus Laughed.

Michael Arlen will have his name on two plays, written in collabora-tion. Edith Ellis has dramatized his The Cavalier of the Streets and Winchell Smith has helped Mr. Arlen on a comedy called What Fun Frenchmen Have.

George M. Cohan will possibly act in a musical show written by himself and called The Melody Maid. He will also present a comedy of his authorship called The Home Towners.

Channing Pollock, author of the tear-jerking The Fool and The Enemy has a new play called Mr. Moneypenny.

Best Plays

These are the plays which, in the light of metropolitan criticism, seem most important.

SERIOUS THE GREAT GOD BROWN — Eugene O’Neill’s confusing problem about selling your brains to the devil. CRAIG’S WIFE — About a woman who dusted her house so carefully that it ceased to be a home. LULU BELLE — Lenore Ulric painting a brilliantly tawdry picture of a Negro dance hall girl. LESS SERIOUS CRADLE SNATCHERS — In which three lonely ladies, aged about 40, find diversion in three young men from college. WHAT EVERY WOMAN KNOWS — J. M. Barrie and Helen Hayes collaborating in a most satisfactory revival. AT MRS. BEAM’S — The terrible predicament of a boarding house which harbors a woman-eater. MUSICAL For song and electric sunshine these are recommended: Sunny, Ziegfeld’s Revue, Iolanthe, Cocoanuts, Scandals, Merry World, Vagabond King.