The Theatre: Flesh Cathedral

Earl Carroll’s Vanities are rococo. Florenz Ziegfeld’s Follies are smart. And yet, in spite of his overpowering, unwholesome gaudiness. Earl Carroll is probably a better showman than Florenz Ziegfeld. When he puts on his annual durbar there is a spontaneity to its promotion which Producer Ziegfeld strives painfully to attain. One night last week a crowd choked Manhattan’s Seventh Avenue to witness the most recent, most important mile stone in Producer Carroll’s theatrical career. He was presenting the ninth annual Vanities in the newest, largest U. S. playhouse — his own.

The interior of Mr. Carroll’s $4,500,000 cathedral was obviously not the work of restrained Architect Joseph Urban, who built the Ziegfeld Theatre. It was done by George Keister and Joseph J. Babolnay. Tier upon tier of colored stone ribbed with twinkling metal rose like the bulge of a gigantic layer cake. A loudspeaker in the lobby urged latecomers to hurry in.

Earl Carroll has no sense of humor. But he has a remarkable gift for display. There is only one funny person in his show. A series of dirty jokes, very old, very stupid, are used to pass the time while more and more gorgeous settings are being made ready. Rousing climax of this element in the entertainment comes when five tons of chromium are lowered and a host of pretty girls in pale green are set to dancing before it. At another time, scores of undressed dancers with naked heels flash between glimmering crystal scimitars to Ravel’s throbbing Bolero. There is also a “pageant of the ages” during which a gigantic papier-mache dinosaur lumbers across with a lady in its mouth. The dinosaur is characteristic of Producer Carroll : in the current Follies, Producer Ziegfeld has girls carried by mere elephants.

Best talent in the show is droll Will Mahoney. With a hammer on each shoe and a sad expression on his face he makes music by dancing on a giant xylophone— the ”Mahoneyphone.” Chicago theatre-goers saw this act tried out last year in Earl Carroll’s Sketchbook.

At the end of Act I on the opening night, Producer Carroll appeared attired in a rumpled tan smock and wearing earphones through which he had been listening to the performance. He said something about wanting to give people a big show for a maximum admission of $3. He introduced his backer, Banker William Reynolds Edrington of Fort Worth. Tex. and Manhattan, president of Edrington-Minot Corp. and Edrington Investment Co. It was as a consequence of a birthday party which Producer Carroll gave Banker Edrington that Producer Carroll was sent to Atlanta Penitentiary for perjury in 1927. It was also as a consequence of the birthday party (the producer denied that a girl had sat naked in a tub of wine) that Earl Carroll became a national character.

Earl Carroll was born in Pittsburgh 39 years ago. He quit school when he was 10, became a program boy in the local theatres. At 16 he set out for the Orient, knocked about Shanghai, Canton, Hongkong. When he got home he began writing plays and song lyrics. He wrote the lyrics for the late great Enrico Caruso’s “Dreams of Long Ago.” Then Oliver Morosco called him out to California to write the music and lyrics for the oldtime hit So Long Letty. After that he wrote Eddie Cantor’s first musical comedy, Canary Cottage. By the time the War came, Producer Carroll was made. He enlisted as a private in the air service, was commissioned, made a pilot. He was the first man to land an airplane in Manhattan’s Central Park.

Producer Carroll is sensitive, nervous, trusting, uses perfume. His term in the Atlanta penitentiary nearly killed him. After he was released, a prison friend came to see him. The man kept looking at his watch. “I find myself doing this all the time,” he said. “I get a mental picture of what the other prisoners are doing.” Like his paroled friend, Earl Carroll, too, is always looking at his watch.

New Plays in Manhattan

Three Times the Hour. Yale’s famed Drama Professor George Pierce Baker teaches his young men and women how to get a lot of characters on and off the stage. Three Times the Houris the product of a Baker student, Valentine Davies. It is a tricky mystery play through which march 26 necessary and unnecessary characters. The audience is permitted to peep in on the doings during the hour before midnight on three separate floors of the Blake home on upper Fifth Avenue. The view of each floor requires one act.

Act I, downstairs, discovers a party in progress. While guests make merry, large-footed detectives see that no one reaches Mr. Blake upstairs. As the curtain falls a shot is heard.

Act II, upstairs, during the same time as Act I, reveals a group of privileged folk who have managed to get by the guards below. At the end of this act the shot is again heard, more loudly.

Act III reveals the whole bloody business in the third floor study. It seems that Mr. Blake, a ruthless financier, is plotting to ruin a South American republic. Ample motive is represented for agents of the threatened nation wishing to kill Banker Blake. Then the murderer walks in, does the deed—not for financial or patriotic reasons.

After Tomorrow. The play which Producer John Golden has chosen to usher in this season sets out deliberately to make its audiences weep. If spectators are compelled to blubber at After Tomorrow they must realize that, like Alice’s, their tears are not real tears. They are being hoodwinked by bald and brazen theatrical bathos.

Producer Golden must have run an appraising eye over the drama of recent seasons. As in June Moon, the goodhearted, puttering insurance salesman (Donald Meek) is provided with a shrewish wife who finally runs away with the boarder who has just turned embezzler. The salesman’s daughter (Barbara Robbins), a modified Bad Girl, is very gay and brave about saving up money to marry Pete (Ross Alexander). When Barbara’s father hears that his wife has run away, he has a heart attack. The young couple postpone their wedding, spend their money trying to get him well. Just as things are looking their blackest for the young pair, the old man has the good grace to die.

Within their limits, all of After Tomorrow’s actors perform well. Donald Meek, the theatre’s perpetual henpecked husband, does a startling job of acting when he finds his departed wife’s farewell note tucked in his tobacco jar. He pecks desperately at the air, gabbles, flaps his arms like a crow, hops to the middle of the stage and collapses.