Theatre: New Plays in Manhattan: Apr. 21, 1930

Jonica is musical comedy at $3.50 top concerning a cute girl who journeys from a convent to attend a wedding in Manhattan. The complications, song cues and jokes are mainly occasioned by her unique naivete, in contrast with the worldly wisdom of a fat man and an actress whom she meets on the trip and re-encounters in her baffled adventures at a bachelor’s apartment. The plot is furthered by a gunshot on a Pullman car, causing the fat comic to poke crude fun at a little girl who is traveling with her mother.

The mysteriously salable banalities of musical comedy are further exemplified in Jonica by a song entitled “I Want Someone,” the queer facial contortions of Joyce Barbour, who really can be pretty, and a wedding parade in which the girl from the convent is propelled, by coincidence, into matrimony.

Live and Learn. Presented by Michael Kallesser—who wrote One Man’s Woman, Trial Marriage, Marriage on Approval— Live and Learn is a thin little wisp of domestic dramaturgy. If Frederick Manning (“a vagabond and a plunger”) had not come to dine with Harold (“who has a pagan love for movement and color”) and Mabel Fuller, along with Annette Roberts (“a gold digger on a legal holiday”), there would have been no elderberry wine. Had it not been for the elderberry wine, Harold would not have been drunk, Annette more drunk. Nor would Mabel have left home and Frederick received all blame. Commentators based their criticism, in essence, upon the curtain line of Act I: “The whole thing has been a mistake, a failure.”