The Theatre: Marine Circus

By last week it was abundantly clear that Fanny Brice’s big little husband,Billy Rose, merits some title—other than pressagents’ superlatives—to indicate his uniqueness as a showman. “Fair Doctor” might serve, with the understanding that the exposition managements which seek his services are not necessarily sick but simply want the shot-in-the-arm of financial confidence which the Rose technique provides. Last year when the Texas Centennial fair got under way at Dallas, Doctor Rose was called in by Fort Worth and encouraged, with a contract paying $1,000 a day for 100 days (TIME, June 8, 1936),to unleash his imagination upon a rival fair. Mr. Rose carted his musical circus Jumbo down to Fort Worth and set up four or five other super-spectacles, including Sally Rand and her fans. So well satisfied were the city fathers of Fort Worth that they signed up Doctor Rose on the same terms for a second Frontier festival, which opens late this month. Lately Mr. Rose has been shuttling between Texas and Lake Erie, because this year he is playing doctor to another exposition—Cleveland.

Last year booming out of Depression, Cleveland was proud & pleased that the Great Lakes Exposition which it whacked together in 80 days entertained 4,000,000 visitors with a total take of $15,000,000.

One of the chief attractions was Dancer Toto Leverne, who appeared five times a day with no covering other than a stuffed swan (TIME, July 13). When it was decided to carry the fair into its second season, Manager Lincoln Griffith Dickey thought that perhaps hundreds of almost naked girls might be a better prop than one entirely bare one. The logical man to call in was Billy Rose. His contract was reported to be $100,000 for 101 days.

Part of the Rose genius is that he enters wholeheartedly into the atmosphere of the place where he is working. In Texas he rode around in chaps and a ten-gallon hat, wore a gold deputy sheriff’s badge, kept a two-headed snake and three live wolves in his office. When he arrived at the Cleveland fairgrounds and saw the waters of Lake Erie rippling at his feet, he decided to stage a revue in and on the water, a sort of marine circus. He immediately had a dolphin tattooed on his chest and went around saying, “H2O, you so-and-so!”

For his water spectacle, which he named BILLY ROSE’S AQUACADE, the velvet-eyed little showman hired a handful of aquatic stars including Johnny (“Tarzan”) Weissmuller, Eleanor Holm Jarrett, who is at home with either water or champagne. Divers Aileen Riggin and Dick Degener and Stubby Kreuger, the diving clown. A floating stage 160 ft. wide, equipped with diving towers, was built in a shipyard and towed into place on the lake front by six tugs. While the Aquacade was going on, the stage was to be 60 ft. offshore from the block-long casino whence 4,000 spectators could watch. After the show the stage would move in on underwater runways so close that guests could step aboard and dance to the music of big-name bands. Rose had his usual staff to carry out his ideas: stage designs by Albert Johnson, direction by John Murray Anderson, costumes by Raoul Pene duBois, music by Dana Suesse (Whistling in the Dark, You Ought to Be in Pictures, My Silent Love, The Night is Young and You’re So Beautiful).

Ready for the exposition opening last fortnight after a last-minute scramble, the Aquacade got into stride last week. Casino diners saw a show in four scenes—California, Coney Island, Florida and Lake Erie—in which the swimming and diving stars performed and the chorus girls dived like rows of falling dominoes, swam in unison to the music, formed decorative configurations in the water. Between scenes a 40-ft. curtain of water projected by jets at the surface hid the stage. In the final scene Billy Rose (real name: William Samuel Rosenberg) gave vent to his anti-Fascist feelings with a song called “It Can’t Happen Here,” a ballet of Men in Black, Men in Brown. Men in Red,a procession of four miniature battleships moving across the water accompanied by martial music and the drone of airplane propellers. At the climax, a girl in a rhinestone robe mounts in a hidden elevator to the tower-top, with an escort of imitation West Point cadets and fireworks bursting over her head.

Other Great Lakes Exposition attractions are Winterland, a big skating rink with a troupe of performers headed by Maribel Yerxa Vinson; performances of The Drunkard, the hiss-the-villain melodrama which had a long run in Manhattan in 1934; Tony Sarg’s marionettes. The management declared flatly that this year there would be no “peep shows” or “gyp joints.” Last week the first seven days’ attendance stood at 234,537.