The Theatre: New Plays in Manhattan: Sep. 29, 1930

Luana. One proverb of show-business says that first-rate plays become second-rate musicomedies.— Oldtime theatregoers who remember that lush melodrama The Bird of Paradise—in which Lenore Ulric, Laurette Taylor, Lewis Stone, Guy Bates Post once took part—did not find Arthur Hammerstein’s florid musical adaptation, Luana, as successful entertainment as its progenitor. Tediously faithful to the original plot in which a princess of the Sandwich Islands marries a young U. S. doctor, only to lose him and destroy herself in a volcano as a sacrifice to her people, Producer Hammerstein has given his show an exceedingly dull and majestic pace.

It has been so many years since ukuleles and hula dancing were introduced to the U. S. that any attempt to revive the Hawaiian mood which burgeoned in 1913 somehow becomes tawdry, tasteless, stagey. The booming Viennese melodies and waltzes that Rudolf Friml has provided for Luana may seem less incongruous, more tuneful when heard removed from the setting of papier-mache palm trees, skirts of all grasses and emaciated, brown-powdered chorus boys. Robert Chisholm (Golden Dawn, Sweet Adeline}, as a drunken beachcomber, does some powerful chanting with “Son of the Sun.” Ruth Altman, the latest find of Producer Hammerstein, a luscious-looking lady who sings well but whose speaking voice is throaty to the point of unintelligibility, is fairly satisfactory as the ill-starred princess. The vaudeville team of Jans & Whalen capers through some very thin comedy material, representing the inevitable U. S. Marines. Most hummable waltz: “Magic Spell of Love.”

Symphony In Two Flats. No one qualifies for the title of British Matinee Idol better than handsome, dark-maned Ivor Novello (Davies), songwriter, theatrical manager, playwright, actor, cinemactor. A graduate of Magdalen (pronounced “maudlin”) College, Oxford, he published his first ballad when 15. When he was 21 the War broke out. Mr. Novello signalized the event by composing the big-selling ballad, “Keep The Home Fires Burning.”

The vehicle which brings Mr. Novello to the U. S. for the first time is one of his own making called Symphony In Two Flats, which has enjoyed a profitable London run. Although the author is no doubt aware that a symphony is properly a composition “of three or four movements contrasted in rhythm but related in tonality, having an organic unity of sentiment and style,” the two divisions of Mr. Novello’s drama are almost totally unrelated, autonomous. The only bond which the two sets of characters have is that their apartments are located in the same building.

On “The Floor Above” live David Kennard (Ivor Novello) & wife (Benita Hume). Their story: While working on a symphony, David goes blind. His wife’s suitor subsidizes the family, allows David to believe that his symphony has won a $10,000 competition. David finds out the truth, imagines that his wife is unfaithful, dismisses her. When she returns he will not allow her to sacrifice herself for him, pretends that he has regained his sight. The deception is unsuccessful, however, and Mr. & Mrs. Kennard are last seen at the piano, where he is playing her a little love ditty.

Meanwhile, sandwiched in between the serious affairs that transpire above, the wildest farce is enacted on “The Floor Below.” There a baroque, gold-turbaned widow (Lilian Braithwaite) with an Elinor Glynt in her eye, is trying to keep her daughter from getting married pending her own nuptials. The substance of this vaudeville skit is slim but Playwright Novello patiently works over it until, like the breakfast bacon & eggs, both tales come out about even. A good deal of the action in the Kennard flat upstairs is valid and affecting, in spite of its antiquated situation. And some of the comedy in the flat downstairs is funny, if overlong. At least, audiences felt they had gotten their money’s worth.

Nina Rosa was nurtured through a debut in Chicago and a tryout at the St. Louis Municipal Opera. Manhattan audiences, watching the opening curtain, were reminded of that Hispanic musical durbar of a past season called Rio Rita. There were a number of handsome U. S. citizens transplanted to a South American scene. They apparently had been having difficulty in locating a gold mine in the Andes which had once been worked to a profit by the Incas. The plot grows more Incandescent when it develops that Jack Haines (Guy Robertson) has fallen in love with a lady (Ethelind Terry) who has been despoiled of her father’s gold claims. More or less abetting a scheme to ruin the U. S. prospectors and to snatch Miss Terry from Mr. Robertson is a sinister-appearing gaucho from the Argentine who goes by the name of Don Fernando (Clay Clements).

The course of the operetta has its normal ups and downs until the beginning of Act II, when all of a sudden blond, curly-headed Mr. Robertson starts a rough & tumble fight with Mr. Clements over the favors of Miss Terry. This event helps to differentiate Nina Rosa from its operatic contemporaries. It is really a swashbuckling, galvanated musical drama, of the sort which appeals to a faintly sadistic expectancy on the part of its spectators.

There is some good music written by Sigmund Rombert and in one song— “Pizarro Was a Very Narrow Man”— Irving Caesar has turned out a rollicking lyric. The book, by Otto Harbach, is usually plausible.

Chief eye-attraction is Armida, a sprightly maiden from Hollywood (General Crack, A Texas Moon), who capers through some heelful routines. Most memorable tunes of the show include: “Nina Rosa,” “Your Smiles, Your Tears,” “A Gaucho Love Song,” “My First Love, My Last Love.”

The Messrs. Shubert have taken pains to point out that “all Inca detail in Nina Rosa, as well as the Inca designs for the curtains, are based upon authentic relics and data obtained in Peruvian museums.” Settings appeared authentic, chorines merely Perusable.

With Privileges is called a “psychological drama.” It is the work of Ruth Welty, onetime psychology instructor. Scene of the experimentation is the kitchen of a rooming house in which the subjects, eight seedy guests, are privileged to cook their meals. There is Carl Westcott (Roy Hargrave), an incipient architect from Ohio, who loves a dark and mysterious girl named Rachel, and is loved by the landlady’s cousin Mary. After Mr. Hargrave has won a Beaux Arts prize of $5,000 he takes Rachel to Atlantic City where she hopes to find her vanished lover and where Mr. Hargrave hopes to accomplish his end. Neither succeeds. Returned to the kitchen, Rachel jumps from the roof, Mr. Hargrave enacts another one of his hysterical scenes which brought him into prominence in The Spider and Houseparty. With Privileges is meagre theatrical fare.

The Rhapsody concerns itself with the problems of Lodar Baron (Louis Calhern), a Hungarian composer who still harbors a persecution fixation, brought on during the War by a brutal sergeant in his regiment. From time to time the composer disappears to go on informal manhunts when the thought of his onetime superior obsesses him. When the able ministrations of a mistress and a sweetheart are incapable of assuaging him, his physician sagely conceives the plan of facing him with the sergeant, letting Lodar blast away at him with a revolver loaded with blanks. This cures Lodar, rings down the curtain on a spotty, boresome play. Audiences wondered what ever persuaded Producer George M. Cohan to allow the piece to appear under his auspices.

Insult. The spectacle of British actors speaking British-translated lines from a Dutch drama on an American stage is likely to become confusing. So marked are the types in Jan Fabricius’ play that one feels the mummers have mislaid the Sam Browne belts, pith helmets and khaki drill uniforms of England’s tropical troops, adorning themselves by some unfortunate mistake in the wardrobe department with the pot caps and gaiters of the Dutch East Indies colonial army. This is rather a weighty matter since the costuming in such an absurd play as Insult is a necessary adjunct to the silly posturing of its actors.

Laid in the Dutch colonies of the Far East, Insult’s main characters are: a testy old major, his fair-haired daughter-in-law, and the dashing half-caste officer who is a friend of her husband and in love with her. Enraged by the major, the half-caste strikes him, thereby making himself eligible for the death penalty-under military law. During a thunderstorm just prior to this occurrence the swart lieutenant had announced ominously: “The gods are angry tonight; they demand a sacrifice. . . . My native blood is strong within me—something is threatening.” From the standpoint of audience-intelligence, the play is neatly titled.

The Cinderelative. Sensible theatre-goers do not expect a Green Pastures to open every week. They are justified, however, in anticipating that the theatre, like the cinema, will provide adequate potboilers in the interim between really good plays. One more example to the contrary was The Cinderelative, of which the title was no more ridiculous than its hero and heroine—called The Boy and The Girl—and its jumbled, absurd story. There was nothing to recommend this show. Dorothy Hey ward, who helped her husband DuBose adapt his novel Porgy to the stage, did herself an injustice by allowing her name to be mentioned in connection with its authorship.

*There are exceptions, e.g., Hit the Deck from Shore Leave.