The Theatre: New Plays in Manhattan: Nov. 7, 1927

Escape. To John Galsworthy’s products respects must be paid; to Winthrop Ames’ productions respects must be paid. The deepest respects in this Galsworthy-written, Ames-produced drama were paid to

Actor Leslie Howard, slim Englishman who is more than likely to be found in the creations of such froth blowers of the drama as P. G. Wodehouse and Frederick Lonsdale. For Messrs. Galsworthy and Ames he has turned murderer, and he goes through parts of the play, his normally immaculate countenance grimy with sweat and an uncut beard.

To defend a woman, this character knocks a policeman down in the first scene, unwittingly killing him. He is jailed for five years, and spends the rest of the play’s nine scenes fleeing his jailers and his destiny. He evades the jailers but cannot dodge himself; in the final scene he gives himself up to the pursuers to prevent a clergyman from shielding him by telling a lie. He has been at various times in the piece a murderer, a thief, a beggar, but throughout a gentleman. His finer nature traps him.

The play is short (out at 10:30) and chopped small in episodes. These waits weaken interest. Mr. Ames’ excellent staging is not so excellent as usual. Mr. Galsworthy’s thesis is engrossing in a faintly inhibited fashion. “Gentleman worship” is a cult most of the U.S. envies, tries to copy, fails perhaps to understand. For almost any U.S. actor, the part would have been impossible; for Mr. Howard it is a goal unerringly achieved. The Taming of the Shrew develops into a pretty feeble farce along toward the latter half, but up to that time, perhaps unto the end, a normal U. S. citizen will enjoy this version of it more than any other he has ever seen. The piece is played in the trimmest of modern clothes and plainly marked “Talk —do not recite, intone, pant, blow.” It is as clear as a cinema subtitle; clearer. The plot is concentrated in the name; a villainously bad tempered woman is bewildered, wed, cowed by a big beautiful brute. Basil Sidney, who played Hamlet in modern clothes first for Manhattan, acted the tamer ably, though he appeared a trifle over-conscious of his bigness, beauty, brutality. Mary Ellis, the shrew, battled gamely and gave in irresistibly. Their troupe is excellent and the laughs resound, particularly from those who think Shakespeare highbrow. Among the modern accessories: a carpet sweeper, short skirts, silk hats, goggles, a radio, an electric heater, revolver shots, an automobile, a flashlight photograph.

If. Lord Dunsany’s dream play, much read in schools and seldom played, appeared last week. A meagre English wage earner disappears over the hills of dreams into an Eastern land. He murders the ruler; rules in his stead; smiles at his consort, a fair but evil-tempered English girl. She plots his death with an envious sheik; he escapes through a secret door; awakes; relieved that life is monotonous, secure. This difficult, often beautiful fantasy was given by the resolute group that is left from the defunct Neighborhood Playhouse.* They gave it well on an obviously limited expense account. Why it has never been given by a commercial manager in Manhattan became apparent; it is only intermittently interesting to the audience.

Immoral Isabella? There is a salty ballad men sing when they are drunk in which Christopher Columbus pleads noisily for ships and cargo; for which he promises Isabella, queen of Spain, to bring her back Chicago. This play is written in the same spirit, but without the humor. The Queen and the mariner are represented as in love with one another, much to the regal irritation of Kind Ferdinand; costumed in his nightie. The queen is a teaser; one never knows whether her love was lewd or purely playful. The King sends Columbus off to discover America just too soon. These ponderous problems are interpreted, well enough, by Frances Starr and Reginald Mason. There is a joke about the Nights of Columbus. The Mulberry Bush. Dramatist Edward Knoblock discusses divorce with some sagacity, some wit, and rare indelicacy. Gathered into one rowdy evening are a mutually cheerful man and the wife from whom he plans severance, his mistress and his fiancee. The quadrangle is finally solved in the wife’s bedroom with plans for the divorce melting in the pink mists of rediscovery. Claudette Colbert, adding to her role such an atmosphere of skillful sex appeal that she seems almost miscast as a lady, acts the wife as best she can; James Rennie, terse, the husband.

The Love Call. Arizona, a melodrama which flourished in 1900, is now set to music. A bevy of not so weatherbeaten song and dance men; a pretty prima donna; dauntless officers; and a team of Mexican dancers pick their way melodiously through the onetime thunderous plot. Fair music, fairer chorus girls scarcely compensate for a deadly lack of laughter.

The Wasps-Nest. Deep in a lonely forest stood a haunted house. No one ever came near it until the night this play was produced. Then there came two train bandits, a southern gentlewoman, a low comedy Negress, a skinflint, a town bum, a lovely girl, a lover and four other friends and enemies of theirs. Scarcely any of them knew anyone else was there; all were caused much uneasiness by noises of others seeking lost papers, pouncing on each other, shooting, screaming. Members of the cast not on salary included an apparition shooting up through the floor, a spectre over the fireplace, a skeleton jigging in an open closet. Parts of it were fairly funny.

Behold This Dreamer looks at each of its auditors, quizzical, mocking, and asks if he is mad. Behind this look is the tale of a man who went to an insane asylum and found happiness. He was not sure that he was mad; sure he did not love his wife. His father-in-law, a successful manufacturer of brushes, thought that not loving his wife was proof that he was mad; that he hated the brush factory further evidence; had him committed. Indulging his artistic dreams in the asylum he painted a masterpiece, was proudly extricated by the brush man; hated home life; went back to the asylum.

This is not a new idea, this blurred boarder line between the dreamer and the daft. As thus discussed it is sometimes ingeniously interesting. Glen Hunter is the star. Patricia O’Hearn is startlingly good as the yammering wife. The title is from Genesis 37, 5.

Best Plays in Manhattan

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

SERIOUS

Civic REPERTORY THEATRE—Eva Le Gallienne’s intrepid revelation of a cycle of good shows @ $1.65.-

AN ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE—A rare sample of Henrik Ibsen reverently revived by Walter Hampden.

PORGY—Song, sunshine and the shadow of death among Negroes near the Charleston docks.

THE LETTER—Katharine Cornell a major murderess in a minor murder play by W. Somerset Maugham.

IF—Reviewed in this issue.

ESCAPE—Reviewed in this issue.

MELODRAMA

INTERFERENCE—Some very nice English people solve a very nasty murder.

THE TRIAL OF MARY DUGAN— Americans, blunt, investigate another nasty murder.

THE SPIDER—Murder—this time under a magician’s management,

DRACULA—The murder of a ghoul.

BROADWAY—Murder for profit back stage at a Manhattan night club.

FUNNY

THE COMMAND TO LOVE—Euro-pean diplomacy with its hair down; no child’s play.

THE SHANNONS OP BROADWAY— The fable in slang of a couple of vaudeville vagrants in the small town hotel business.

BURLESQUE—Beneath the greasepaint with a troupe of burlesque artists.

THE ROAD TO ROME—Where in Hannibal falls instead of Rome.

THE TAMING OF THE SHREW— Reviewed in this issue.

MUSICAL

The utterly irresponsible will enjoy: Hit the Deck, Night in Spain, The Mikado, Chauve-Souris, Good News, Manhattan Mary.

Notes

Tallulah Bankhead lay ill in Paris. Leaving London to buy some clothes over the weekend, the U. S. actress who has been such a great success in England for several years was shocked severely when she heard reports of what had happened at the Lyric Theatre during her absence. Into her part in The Garden of Eden (a recent Manhattan failure) stepped one Miss Wilford, New Zealand actress, previously unknown. So struck was the London audience by her performance that they kept her bowing before the curtain for ten minutes.

Vienna attends what some describe as a new Merry Widow. Edmund S. Eysler has composed Goldene Meisterin (Gold Mistress); Betty Fischer, long lauded star of Viennese operettas, sings it. There is a waltz, a drinking song a comedy nobleman. The theatre is jammed.

Chicago is pleased with Lulu Belle, Negro courtesan success which ran through many Manhattan months. Critics complain that Lenore Ulric is plump.

Last week Bayard Vieller, playwright, tore up a manuscript. It was a dramatization of Elmer Gantry which might, he felt, offend the clergy who might, he felt, get after his present prosperous play The Trial of Mary Dugan. Faint murmurs have been recently heard that Mary Dugan is immoral. The clergy have ways of getting things investigated. Playwrights, too, have ways of getting themselves, their plays, and the profitable murmurs that their plays are immoral in the newspapers.

*Will Shakespeare, The Green Goddest, Old English, The Mikado, etc.

*Producers of many notable artistic, and occasional financial successes—The Dybbuk, The Little Clay Cart, Grand Street Follies, etc. After cheerfully losing money for many seasons, their backers this year withdrew ; the acting group nevertheless amassed some capital and started for themselves.

*Box office prices for popular drama are usually $3.85 ; some times $4.40. Some musical shows get $6.60 per orchestra seat.