Theatre: New Plays in Manhattan: Oct. 1, 1934

The Great Waltz (by Moss Hart; Max Gordon, producer) is a musical biography of Johann Strauss -(“The Blue Danube”) and his able father. The plot is laid in the Habsburgs’ Vienna of 1844, the year the young Strauss, stepping out of the shadow of his father’s contemporary fame, made his name overnight leading the orchestra ‘in his own waltzes at Dommaver’s Casino in the fashionable suburb of Heitzing. Until the father’s death five years later, the two Johann Strausses were bitter rivals for the title of Waltz King.

Using Strauss music throughout, The Great Waltz dramatizes the son’s ambition and despair before the great night at Dommayer’s, his suspicions of his father’s jealousy, his waverings between music and marriage, and ends at Dommayer’s with the father proudly waltzing to his son’s and successor’s music. The plot is intelligent, simple and reasonably true to history. The music has been spared the usual interpolations and “improvements.” A chorus of 100. a ballet of 40, an orchestra of 54 supply background for the theme.

The real hero of the occasion is the huge stage of the huge Center Theater (3,700 seats) which has been a money-loser for a year as Rockefeller Center’s second-string cinema theatre. Producer Max Gordon was obliged to build a new proscenium because the original arch would have dwarfed even his gigantic sets. In the finale, the orchestra pit rises majestically, slides back to join the other half of the orchestra onstage. and the united orchestra keeps on sliding back and back, leaving a huge ballroom with golden chandeliers and white and gold columns, ready for the younger Strauss’s big moment.

As the younger Strauss. Guy Robertson (Rose Marie) is sanguine, assiduous and full-voiced. As his fiancée, Marion Claire, an operatic soprano, is able and attractive. Famed Hassard Short, as director, is responsible for the bold use of color in The Great Walts, outraging all rules and achieving magnificent panoramic effects.

The Red Cat (by Rudolph Lothar and Hans Adler. adapted by Jessie Ernst: A. H. Woods, producer). Baron Cassini (Francis Lister) is a bigwig of the Paris Bourse. Eugene Charlier (Francis Lister ) is a peewee entertainer at the Red Cat Cabaret. They look alike. When business reasons make it expedient for the Baron to be in two places at once, he goes to England while Charlier impersonates him at home. When the Baron returns, he hops into bed with the Baroness (Ruth Weston), thinking she thinks he is his double. Out of this situation Authors Lothar and Adler work the last bit of suggestiveness. Charlier’s cabaret-girl mistress (Tamara Geva) disrobes in Act I.

College Sinners (by Terence Rattigan and Philip Heimann; produced by Lee and J. J. Shubert). This inconsequential, mildly entertaining gewgaw was called First Episode when it was produced in London. Importing it along with two or three players, the Brothers Shubert apparently decided that the title should name the ingredients. The “college” is Oxford; the sin is carnal, boyish and fumbled.

Tony Wodehouse (John Halloran) and David Lister (Patrick Waddington) have identical ideas about sex (“women are toys”), until a famed actress inexplicably comes to Oxford to play in the dramatic society production. She is none other than Margot Gresham (Leona Maricle), and when Tony woos her frothily she falls in love with him. Friend David, derisive at first, becomes alarmed when Tony bogs himself in debt and neglects his work to provide Margot with lunches and weekends. When Tony begins to tire of his own accord, Margot blames David’s animosity, tips off the university proctors to David’s hotel rendezvous with a harmless little blonde, with the result that David is “sent down” two weeks before graduation. Worst line (Tony to David): “Body, body, body -all you can think of is body!”

Errant Lady (by Nat N. Dorfman; Harry Albert, producer) is a suggestive drawingroom farce concerned with the sexual appetites of a respectable family. A young wife is determined to divorce her husband and marry a Russian artist. Conversational brawls between husband and lover, lover and father, lover and mother, husband and mother, boil the last drop of innuendo out of the situation. Finally when the husband pulls a gun on the lover, the mother announces that it is not her daughter but herself whom the Russian loves. This seems to give the mother temporary title to the lover. The henpecked father, the daughter and the daughter’s husband are all delighted. At the play’s end the mother returns, chaste but chastened, with the play’s lowest line, as her emancipated husband goes off to shoot wild ducks: “You can’t warm your feet on a wild duck.”