Theatre: New Plays in Manhattan: Oct. 9, 1933

As Thousands Cheer (words & music by Moss Hart & Irving Berlin; Sam Harris, producer). Even more tasteful than The Band Wagon, every bit as funny as Of Thee I Sing, this revue began turning away a cue of ticket seekers at 11 o’clock on the morning after its first night. What people missed who did not get in:

A prelude in which a man (Leslie Adams, the droll cuckold of Goodbye Again) bites a dog, a cataclysm which looses a series of news stories that never, never could have happened. Citizen & Mrs. Hoover leave the White House, but Mrs. Hoover (acidic Helen Broderick) does not depart without telling Dolly Gann what she thinks of her, nor does she forget to strip the place of spoons, portraits, electric toasters and the radio aerial. John D. Rockefeller (Clifton Webb) totters after his son with a knife when he learns the family owns Radio City. Mahatma Gandhi (Mr. Webb in a sheet) plans a vaudeville act with Aimee Semple McPherson, in which the two sing a duet and execute an off-to-Buffalo. Mary of England learns that the Prince of Wales has misbehaved on a goodwill trip.

Under the headline HEAT WAVE STRIKES CITY, Ethel Waters, in a gay and gaudy martinique costume incinerates her audience with a thumping little tune with a haunting Caribbean lilt to it:

She started a heat wave

By making her seat wave.

And in every way she makes the customers say,

She certainly can—can-can.

No less accomplished a talent than Ethel Waters is sprightly Marilyn Miller, who always seems illumined by a bright inward gayety. Not since Smiles (1930) has Miss Miller been seen on the stage. She rewards her many admirers for her absence with some brilliant ballroom dancing, a cunning burlesque of Lynn Fontanne, a sprightly tap dance in which, surrounded by funnypaper characters, she takes Skippy to her bosom, departs hand in hand with Mickey Mouse. At one point Miss Broderick tunefully predicts: “Uncle Sam will be in Heaven when the dollar goes to Hell.” Even then As Thousands Cheer should still be making money.

Sailor, Beware! (by Kenyon Nicholson & Charles Knox Robinson; Courtney Burr, producer). The thirteenth play of the new dramatic season has no jinx on it. It is as funny as it is bawdily outrageous, and so neatly executed that you will not recall many individual lines. The comic elements in Sailor, Beware! are simple enough: “Dynamite” Jones (Bruce Macfarlane) is the deadliest love pirate in the U. S. Navy. He has cardboard boxes full of garters, duly tagged, to prove it. In Panama, however, lives a young lady named Billie Jackson (Audrey Christie) whose hard heart has gained her the sobriquet of “Stonewall.” Dynamite’s friend Barney organizes a big sweepstake, wagering his prized key-winding watch that Dynamite can overcome Stonewall’s maidenly reticence within a week. Dynamite wins, in a sense. But since the victory involves marriage, all bets are off. Amusing sequence: Dynamite, returning to his ship late on the fifth night of his campaign, laboriously pulling off blouse, pants and shoes just in time to hear reveille, and remarking stoically: “A short night.”

Men in White (by Sidney Kingsley; Group Theatre, producer), a medical improvisation on the Grand Hotel theme, is laid in a Manhattan hospital called St. George’s and is concerned with the stern denials and spiritual rewards of those who live under the oath of Hippocrates. Capably staged by Lee Strasberg, the play, Mr. Kingsley’s first-staged, has periods of magniloquence and structural fatuity. But graceful teamwork on the part of most of the Group’s eager company of actors makes Men in White credible, valid in many a sequence.

If you have ever been around a hospital you will be surprised, in the first scene, to see a roomful of internes rush off the stage as though the devil had them by the coat tails when it is announced that a patient with lacerated wrists has been brought into the emergency ward. You may smile when, in the second scene, a doctor diligently studies a patient’s chart and then asks the attendant nurse for the patient’s pulse rate. Still another surprise is in store. For just as the doctor is about to inject insulin to revive the patient from post-operative shock, in bursts Interne Ferguson to snatch the hypodermic out of his superior’s hand, administer his own entirely different treatment.

Ferguson (Alexander Kirkland) has a bad day of it all around. His rich fiancée (Margaret Barker, a striking blonde with a thick Colony Club accent) gives him to understand that he must choose between dedicating his life to medicine and research, or living with her in the comfort of a Parkavian practice. At the critical moment, a little student nurse impulsively surrenders herself to Interne Ferguson.

Three months later she dies of a septic abortion. The interne’s friend and mentor (J. Edward Bromberg), a famed surgeon, appears to announce: “Jehovah and Aesculapius—they both demand their human sacrifices.” The interne then makes up his mind what he is going to do with his life. Excellent scene, recommendable to those who will want to make a cinema out of Men in White: the operating theatre, with the attendants meticulously scrubbing and rinsing themselves.

Kultur (by Adolf Philipp; J. J. Vincent, producer) hastens into the U.S. Theatre as the first play about Hitlerite Germany. In its humble way it sets out to show that a number of wrongs do not make a Reich. A university professor’s family has fallen hard for the exciting propaganda of an unnamed European Chancellor. Anti-Semitism is the statesman’s chief principle. Even the professor’s monocled son-in-law quickly drops his Jewish mistress, confiding: ”Had I known of the success in store for our leader two years ago, my interest in women would have been conducted on a strictly Aryan basis.” To the family’s great distress it is soon discovered that the professor, an eminent surgeon, has Jewish blood in his veins. At this point the Chancellor is injured in a motor accident. Only the Jewish professor is skillful enough to save him—with a blood transfusion donated by a Polish Jew servant. Fitfully slumbering as he recovers, the Jew-blooded Chancellor is now heard to murmur strangely of Liberty, Tolerance, Humanity.

Amourette (by Clare Kummer; Leo Peters & Leslie J. Spiller, producers). Playwright Kummer is famed for such oldtime farce successes as Good Gracious, Annabelle! Be Calm, Camilla and Rollo’s Wild Oat. She is adept at the sort of play in which one set of characters assumes that another set has committed some grave sexual indiscretion, is profoundly shocked when the supposedly iniquitous (but actually innocent) set do not take them seriously. All this leads to considerable confusion on the stage, heavy boredom in the audience. Amourette follows the Kummer pattern, depends for novelty on the fact that the scene is laid in Massachusetts 100 years ago.