The Theatre: New Plays in Manhattan: Nov. 19, 1934

All Rights Reserved (by Irving Kaye Davis; Joseph Pollak, producer) is a farce treatment of the home life of a serious man of letters and the Single Standard. Philip Frampton (William Harrigan) has been away from home three months. During that time he has written his wife Josie (Violet Heming) one letter. That letter grew to such proportions that he sent it not to Josie but to the American Mercury. Meantime Josie has received a bite from what Sherwood Anderson calls “the writing bug” and has turned out a salacious best-seller called A Naked Woman. The book is a case history of a wife who knows how to amuse herself with other men when her husband is out of town. When he learns of A Naked Woman’s authorship, all -Philip Frampton’s profound sex philosophy flies out the window. He distributes black eyes among a trio of males suspected of providing material for his wife’s book, receives one himself, becomes convinced of Josie’s fidelity as the curtain falls.

Say When (book, music & lyrics by Jack McGowan, Ray Henderson & Ted Koehler; McGowan & Henderson, producers). Sounder entertainment than most of its kind, Say When presents no innovations but several elaborations on the hoary old pattern of musical comedy. There are two pairs of lovers—a vaudeville team which has met a couple of female bluebloods from Long Island on a boat. There is also the affair of a smuggled ring and a liaison between the girls’ father and a theatrical baggage. Jack McGowan, master of the “situation gag” rather than the outright nifty, has written a book whose wheezes wilt on paper.

The McGowan libretto, however, moves fast, causes constant amused chuckling. In line with the season’s custom of drafting entertainers from other departments of the drama, frail Linda Watkins (June Moon) finds herself cast as an ingenue in a musical piece for the first time. Lillian Emerson, another legitimate actress, is teamed with Harry Richman, the only man on Broadway who can lisp without exciting suspicion. Bob Hope, the irrepressible juvenile of Roberta, displays a pretty wit. And as a freak draw the management has hired Impostor Harry Gerguson (“Prince Michael Alexandrovitch Dmitry Obolensky Romanoff”), who made a vaudeville appearance last year after a session in jail climaxed a series of transatlantic voyages in stowage. He impersonates himself as a high society gatecrasher.

Derivative but pleasing are these Henderson tunes: “Say When,” “When Love Comes Swinging Along,” “So Long for Ever So Long.”

Dark Victory (by George Brewer Jr. & Bertram Bloch; Alexander McKaig, producer). At least one star fell on Alabama when Tallulah Bankhead was born at Huntsville 32 years ago. Without tarrying long on the stage of her native land, this daughter of a Congressman and niece of a Senator went to England where she played in a dozen successes, settled in a luxurious little house in Farm Street, drove a flashing green Bentley. She was publicly and privately idolized by enthusiastic followers who took her for the personification of Sex. Last year Miss Bankhead came home to act in a featherweight thing called Forsaking All Others. As her present vehicle, Dark Victory won no critical nominations for the Pulitzer Prize, but audiences stood up and shouted their admiration for an authentic exhibition of oldtime theatrical glamour. Nothing like it had been seen since Jeanne Eagels died.

In a rich bravura part, Miss Bankhead impersonates a dashing, devil-may-care sportswoman named Judith Traherne. Thoroughly rebellious, she is taken to see Dr. Steele (Earle Larimore of the Theatre Guild), a brain specialist, by her family physician who is unable to diagnose an obscure ailment of which she is as intolerant as she is afraid. Dr. Steele, about to move to Vermont and settle down to general practice, has the unhappy task of discovering that the young woman has a brain tumor which will kill her in ten months.

Though there are few older situations than this, Miss Bankhead manages to get through the moraturi te salutamus business with a minimum of fustian. She nervously stabs cigarets into ash trays, gasps, whispers in the approved manner of the Green Hat school of acting. With but two months left to live, she finds that dissipation is not a proper preparation for meeting her Maker, goes to Dr. Steele in Vermont. Here, before Death overtakes her, Miss Bankhead runs the other gamut of her talent, bouncing around on furniture, puffing out her cheeks in gay girlishness.

Robert Edmond Jones has shown his usual good taste with the sets.