Theater: New Plays in Manhattan: Oct. 17, 1927

Chauve-Souris. A “ver’ goot audience” clattered generous hands, to see Nikita Balieff* in town again. Save a goatee in one scene and a dented derby in another he appeared in his usual evening clothes; and chattered between the acts. He spoke variously of Abraham Lincoln, Marie Antoinette, Otto Kahn (in the fifth row) ; his audience, his premiere danseuse, and his face. To all this the witnesses listened rapt; to his show they were only slightly less attentive.

It was straight vaudeville in Russian and French, and here and there cracked English. It was new. Neither the famed wooden soldiers nor the well remembered Katinka played their parts. A concentration of Verdi’s La Traviata, burlesqued; a pantomime in the Sultan’s harem; the lovely figure of the danseuse were most volubly received. As always it was fresh, delicate; strange to slangy Manhattan. Four weeks it will linger in the city and then start in Washington a tour of population centres reaching to California.

An Enemy of the People. Walter Hampden, the honorable mantle of president of The Players newly flung about his shoulders (TIME, Oct. 10), opens his season with Ibsen. It is a comfortable combination. Ibsen can scarcely be mangled by bad acting; Hampden can scarcely play a piece crudely. Many Ibsen plays have been given in Manhattan these past seasons; probably few better than this Enemy of the People. The play tells the story of a Norwegian doctor who found that the baths in his town were unsanitary and struggled desperately with the citizens, who felt it better for their individual bank account to let the germs flourish.

My Princess. For years now, Hope Hampton, onetime cinemactress, has been advancing the possibility that she would appear as a light opera prima donna. To this end she has been taking singing lessons and variously equipping herself. She also has a rich husband,* and on the whole things looked pretty black for the public.

But Hope Hampton produced the agreeably unexpected—a more than good enough voice, a fair acting talent and a head of red hair that in most prima donnas would make up for everything. Here she is occupied in crashing U. S. society with the help of an organ-grinder posing as a prince. There are a few, a very few, jokes.

But Miss Hampton, the plot and the jokes are not really important. The things that matter are the music by Sigmund Romberg,† and the ensemble singing. These factors measure up to the most rigorous standard of recent large scale, light opera in the Shubert manner. Contented patrons of The Student Prince and things like that may dedicate an evening to My Princess.

Sidewalks of New York. The mysterious Eddie Dowling to whom Graham McNamee referred, irrelevantly, in his broadcasting to 50,-000,000 people from the ringside of the Tunney-Dempsey fight and to whom the same Mr. McNamee referred equally irrelevantly through the press box microphone at the first World’s Series baseball game, is now revealed. All Broadway and showbusiness knew him anyway as actor and producer of Sally, Irene, and Mary and Honeymoon Lane. To the public at large he is just another theatrical producer, fortunate in his word-of-mouth advertising. His show is much like his earlier shows; sweet and swift and aimed at the simple public rather than the shrewd. It is all Manhattan life in tinsel musical comedy caricature. The obstreperous Ray Dooley (Mrs. Bowling) makes parts of it hilariously amusing with her squalling childlike tactics. There is one terrible moment when an actor representing Governor Alfred Emanuel Smith (whom the show booms for President) makes a speech to an orphan asylum.

The New York Times: “Composed of the same eminently saleable materials that have made Abie’s Irish Rose, mammy songs, Mary Pickford and the comic strips such inexhaustible institutions of our national life.” Romancing ‘Round. “Fun in the Navy” might be an appropriate subtitle for this selection. It is set on the Brooklyn water front; and a young woman is enamored of one of the sailors. She has a former lover and an irascible father of impeccable lineage. These splatter the stage with farce and melodrama to a happy, if firmly foregone, conclusion. Helen McKellar, called to the part on less than a week’s notice, is more than fitted for the foremost role.

Dracula. A quarter century ago, a book (Bram Stoker’s Dracula) dealt with a gruesome being, dead five centuries, who haunted maidens’ boudoirs in the shape of a bat, to drink their blood. So horrible were its beastly visions that many a maid fell helpless with hysterics; mothers banned the book, after reading it secretly themselves, and fainting. This book is now a play, packed grimly with cursing madmen, open graves, the scream of dogs, the shadow of Beath.

The world, or a least that particle of it which is represented in the audience at Manhattan theatres, has come a long way in 25 years. Now maidens can see grisly horror, and withdraw between the acts to smoke a cigaret and talk calmly of their minor vices. But when they are in the theatre they can scarcely resist

Dracula; nor can their stalwart escorts. It is a chamber of horrors to raise the most jaded hair. Viewed technically it has its faults of mechanics and an occasional unevenness of interest. It is well but by no means perfectly played. Yet the material is morbidly magnificent. And of course it is all perfectly silly.

Alexander Woollcott, New York World: “Ye who have fits prepare to throw them now.”

John Anderson, New York Evening Post: “See it and creep.”

The House of Women. Louis Bromfield has won repute as a novelist, which his disciples hope will not be damned by faint plays. Novelist became dramatist last week with a theatricalization of his story The Green Bay Tree. This transference was achieved under the sentient auspices of Arthur Hopkins,* and brought to life upon the stage by such luminaries as Elsie Ferguson and Nance O’Neil. The whole was considerably smaller than the sum of the parts; the general verdict blamed the play.

A story is told of two daughters, one frozen by the memories of a deceased brutal father; the other warmed by the hot blood of his inheritance. The latter increases the world’s population by one surreptitiously but serenely. The former is unnaturally intent on nothing but good works. Both, finally, are attracted by an aggressive labor leader. Miss Ferguson is lovely but not always lucid as the looser sister. The best performance of the play is Nance O’Neil’s. She portrays the mother, bloody but unbowed after many years of connubial fireworks with the barbaric father.

John Anderson (New York Evening Post) : “Except for the slight but insuperable barrier of authorship I would have thought that Mr. Bromfield hadn’t read The Green Bay Tree”

Hidden. David Belasco requests the honor of your presence at a play by William Hurlbut.*The principal performers are Beth Merrill and Philip Merivale; and the subject is sex. Mr. Belasco has held U. S. attention for many years, and sex has held it even longer. But both, unfortunately, have lost to some extent their novelty for playgoers. Time was when a Belasco production, correct to the last curl of cigaret smoke, was considered just about the best in town. Latterly patrons have come to realize that Mr. Belasco erects meticulously-perfect sets and shrewdly constructed plots; but that often they do not mean much. This one might have meant a lot five years ago. It is a study of a high-strung virgin much in love with her sister’s husband. The resulting tale of how she smashed his home with hysteric lies is another portrait of the sex-starved woman. There have been many such portraits in life and letters of late. Hidden is another good one; affords an interesting evening in the theatre; and never achieves brilliance. Mr. Merivale gives a good, well-bred performance; Miss Merrill a good performance.

Clown

(See front cover.)

To Nikita Balieff came Morris Gest-in Paris.

“Will you,” asked Morris Gest, “come to America?”

“Only a stupid man would take me to America,” said Nikita Balieff. “I speak Russian, the only language nobody understands.”

Said Morris Gest: “I am that stupid man.”

That stupid man took M. Balieff to America. This week Balieff opens in Manhattan for his fifth U. S. season. For himself and for that stupid man he has made endless thousands of dollars; he has stamped his personality on the U. S. amusement mind as one of the few infallibles. He carries with him a Russian vaudeville show; upon which he comments to the audience between the acts in wretched English. This combination is called the Chauve-Souris.

Odd, but M. Balieff is not a Russian at all. He was born in Erzerum, Armenia, of a merchant family which held up their hard worked hands in horror when young Nikita divulged a yearning for the stage. Nikita shrugged his not, in those days, so very hardworked shoulders, deserted the family, who promptly cast him off, and was presently heard knocking at the stage door of the great Art Theatre in Moscow. He got a job.

“All the directors of the theatre thought I was talent full,” he relates, “but during the ten years of my service in Moscow Art Theatre from the period thousand nine hundred six till thousand nine hundred sixteen they gave me no one but one speaking part. All other parts were dumb.”

It has been said a man is a genius in the ratio that he possesses woman’s qualities (emotion, perception, tenderness, ruthlessness). Genius Balieff possessed one woman’s quality, and it finally drove him to desert the Moscow Art. He craved to talk. To satisfy this craving he formed his own theatre; in its early days a sort of music hall cafe, and called it The Bat. “When I make the theatre in a cellar, as I go in one day. . . one bat was flying out and sat on my hat.”

Moscow approved The Bat. The Tsar saw the show; invited M. Balieff to dinner. Came 1917 and revolution. In 1919 Nikita Balieff was jailed because he “was not consented with their views on poltique.” He pointed his fingernails and skulking behind a long square beard escaped to Georgia (southern Russia) as a Persian.

Soon he turned up in Paris with 20,000 francs, hired the Femina Theatre, and put on a vaudeville with Russian emigres, only three of whom were professional performers. The first attempt was creaky but a “moral success”; its possibilities were recognized by Charles Cochran, London producer. Under Mr. Cochran’s management M. Balieff took the troupe to London. Shortly afterward “that stupid man” appeared, M. Balieff and his vaudeville opened in Manhattan and played 65 consecutive weeks; toured; became a U. S. institution.

Nikita Balieff is bored with one thing—”The Parade of the Wooden Soldiers.” Their famed mechanical march and the tune that went with it has been played, imitated, repeated over most of the civilized world. The idea came from a tradition of the autocracy of Tsar Paul I. Absentminded, the Tsar walked off the parade ground one afternoon, forgetting to give the command to halt. Because he was so cruel, nobody dared remind him. The soldiers went marching on to somewhere in Siberia before he remembered and ordered them to return. They arrived with beards. The Parade based on this legend is the most widely known of the Chauve Souris repertory.

People ask whether M. Balieff in private really speaks as broken English as he does for public consumption. He does not. But his dialect has become so completely a stock in trade that he uses it in conversation and correspondence. Says he:

“One was in Glasgow. I was coming to a pharmacy, and the pharmacist said to me: ‘Mr. Balieff, I was yesterday at your show, but I cannot understand in what language you spoke, and I think if you could speak English well you would earn very big money.’

“I answered him: ‘And you sir, are you a rich man?’

“He says me: ‘I have a little pharmacy; that is all I have.’

“I answered: ‘That is very curious; for you speak so well the English.'”

*See page 42 for a further report on Nikita Balieff. *Jules Brulatour, Manhattan.

†Maytime, The Student Prince, My Maryland; also The Golden West, due soon in Manhattan. *Producer of What Price Glory, The Old Soak, Burlesque, John Barrymore’s Hamlet. *Author Hurlbut has written many a play, mostly second rate ; one exceedingly fine, Bride of the Lamb (Alice Brady). *Importer of the Moscow Art Theatre, of the late Duse, of The Miracle. †French for “Bat.”