Theatre: New Plays in Manhattan: Nov. 19, 1928

A Man with Red Hair. As everyone who read Hugh Walpole’s book knows, A Man with Red Hair concerns a self-immolating masochist whose philosophy is that pain gives power to the pained, makes the sufferer like unto God. Mr. Crispin learned the philosophy from his father who had tortured him as a boy. At Westminster he was different. His flamboyant red hair, pudgy hands and a distorted face which bespoke a grotesque mind, made him different through life. A man of wealth, he indulged his idiosyncratic taste for cruelty and his incongruous love of good etchings. He liked to choke old ladies. He cut the tongues from the mouths of his three Japanese servants. Mr. Crispin has a son whose father-fixation is so unshakable that he agrees to be the nominal husband of a girl whom Mr. Crispin wants to torture. An impulsive young Englishman who loves her, plots to rescue her from the Crispin home. He is aided by an ineffectual young American (who supplies the only comic relief by frequent, skillful references to Baker, Oregon, “a place in America,” where he has two sisters, Hetty and Jane, “good girls”). Apprehended, the Englishman is bound by the wrists, his back is used as an etching-plate, upon which Mr. Crispin cuts with a surgical scalpel the likeness of an ass. The American is subjected to mental torture. But just as Mr. Crispin, drawing on a surgeon’s blouse, is about to consummate his fiendish plans for the Englishman, the American and the girl, the three dumb Japs, squealing laughter from tongueless mouths, have their own revenge. This is the last scene and is the most thrilling in a season which has tried very hard to provide thrills. Edward G. Robinson (Mr. Crispin) and his Garrick Players did well.

Hotbed. It is the conviction of those who write plays for Broadway that Puritanism is not a state of mind but a vice; thus they attack it with knives and reformatory fury, instead of explaining it. Hotbed, like Revolt a week ago. deals with a blue-nosed divine, the Rev. David Rushbrook. The scene of his hypocritical virtuosities is a college this time, for Author Paul Osborn himself has been a pedagogue. An assistant professor seduced the Rev. Rushbrook’s daughter, after drinking whiskey.

The acting in Hotbed is enough to make it somewhat exciting. William Ingersoll is the bad goodman, Alison Bradshaw his daughter, and Richard Stevenson the assistant professor detected in a process of seduction.

This Year of Grace was heralded by fanfares, tuckets and sennets such as seldom announce anything less than the birth of a Prince of Wales or the entrance of Lit-tul Lillian Leitzel. Trans-Atlantic commuters who saw its opening at the Pavilion Theatre in London were reduced to choked, ecstatic finger-tip kissing in their attempts to relate its manifold charms. Jesse Matthews, they ultimately gasped, sings “A Room with a View.” . . . Tillie Losch’s fluttering hands, fanciful feet . . . brilliant . . . divine.

Unhappily, Miles. Losch and Matthews are not in Manhattan; their subtle postures and cream-smooth notes are sadly needed. Of course, Marjorie Moss and Georges Fontana float through their waltz scene to threaten voidance of Pavlowa’s lifelong lease on “incomparable.” Madeline Gibson’s demure loveliness forestalls unsympathetic accusations of vocal timidity. But with these exceptions there is no competent voice, no dexterous dancing in the entire revue.

Then, balancing a limp-plumed bonnet, in stalks Beatrice Lillie to be jostled by a bus queue for five minutes of mute martydom, wherein the only betrayal of her cold, furious resentment is a sublime, rancid smirk, and at long last a fervent “Taxi!” Nine times in all she appears, and whether it is the channel swimming scene (“Oh, pul-lease!”), or her deceptively wistful “I’m World Weary,” or the Paris in 1890 scene (“They call me La Flamme because I make men mad”), she is never allowed to leave the stage until her audience is too weak to protest.

Not content with having written the excellent book, lyrics and music, Noel Coward, the costar, sings, dances and otherwise performs. This is unfortunate. The adage “supreme in one, indifferent in all,” very nearly applies. Mr. Coward is a clever satirist and was quite evidently born with a silver tune in his mouth, but he is still caught in The Vortex and overdoes his stuff as a consequence. His frenzied, nail-gnawing and agonized eye-rolling largely detract from the effectiveness of “Dance, Little Lady,” while his indifferent voice and dancing similarly blur a number of other scenes.

Nonetheless, This Year of Grace is a buoyant revue: a little long, perhaps, Coward a little too ambitious, but it has assuredly presented two song-hits of the immediate future, a dozen superb drolleries, and the unforgettable Lillie.

Treasure Girl. As soon as Beatrice Lillie, her onetime co-star in The Chariot Revue, had opened in Manhattan (see This Year of Grace) Gertrude Lawrence opened in a musical show of her own called Treasure Girl. Gertrude Lawrence is certainly the most consistently beautiful of all modern song and dance actresses. The pictures of her face and front and back, which decorate theatre lobbies, do not have to be taken from some special angle or worked over by men with brushes. On her long legs, she moves rapidly about the stage and she sings less with her larynx than with her eyes and hands, which, in Broadway musical shows, is a virtuous ability. Treasure Girl is not fair to her.

Wafted along by George Gershwin’s symphonies, the story is that of a highborn scioness, financially but never socially embarrassed, who wins a treasure hunt and marries a paste-board realtor. So light a continuity suits the demands of airy tunes and jokes, but the moments in which hijackers threaten the treasure hunters, and those in which Leading Lady Lawrence is compelled to grow tempestuous about her silly suitor, do not. With any other actress, the show would be a flop; but Gertrude Lawrence makes it more than acceptable entertainment.

She has, also, one especially able assistant: Walter Catlett speaks of a “sunken garden for fallen women,” and when comparing a watch with a sun dial, he speaks of “old Sol and Ingersol” with fetching apologia.

On Call. A plot, propelled by the long arm of coincidence and the bared shoulder of impropriety, makes John Q. Smith divorce his wife and telephone a female pander. The pander produces the sister of the man with whom John Smith’s wife had misbehaved; she cooks John Smith his dinner in the last act and snuggles innocently when the curtain falls.

The Yellow Jacket was presented in Manhattan for the first time in 1912. In 1916 it was presented again, with the Coburns. Last week Charles D. Coburn and Mrs. Charles D. Coburn brought it back again as the first of a series of revivals in the 63rd Street theatre which now carries their name. There was no sign that the imperial coat, for which the hero and the villian struggle in a flowery manner, had grown less curiously bright.

The first act considers the birth of Wu Hoo Git, whose mother, the first wife of Wu Sin Yin the Great, ascends to her ancestors, leaving Wu Hoo Git to the care of a farmer and to the savage ambitions of the second wife who has already usurped the affections of Wu Sin Yin. In the second act, Wu Hoo Git has grown up; he sets off to find his ancestors but runs instead on lovely girls, of whom the first is mercenary and unfaithful, of whom the second is the innocent and lovely Moy Fah Loy. For love of her, he sets out to take the throne (which is his heritage) away from Wu Fah Din, the Daffodil, son of Wu Sin Yin’s wife, who is sitting on it and in possession of the sun-colored robe.

The Coburns act The Yellow Jacket well. Others in the cast—notably Dorothy Guthern as maid to the second wife, Mary Hutchinson as Moy Fah Loy, Schuyler Ladd as the Daffodil—manage to be coy without being silly. But the hero of the piece is really the property man, played with a dark, perpetual nonchalance by Arthur Shaw. He holds mops for doors and dusts the spray that Wu Fah Din would sniff; if a character is killed, he puts a block beneath his head; during ascents to heaven, it is the property man who holds the ladder; when a tree is required he can be the tree; and when he is not so engaged he sits by his trunk of mysteries, drinking tea.