New Plays

Innocent Eyes. The Winter Garden again turns out a revue of the standard bouncing pattern, with possibly more gold on the costumes, and less costumes on the girls.

Visitors to the Winter Garden can always be comfortably certain of getting the same type of blandishments. To prove this, one has only to submit this list of the outstanding features of the new "hoity-toity, gosh, we're flirty" revue:

1) Mistinguett, French, sprouting ostrich plumes at every pore, and singing statuesquely a song Innocent Eyes, in which her optics come prettily into play.

2) One set showing Parts, very splendiferous.

3) One set showing Paris, very dank and forbidding.

4) A tempestuous pantomime of a French father selling his daughter to a brutal Apache, in which Mistinguett reveals her veritable acting ability, appearing tragic even when she climbs out of a tank (the Seine).

5) Cecil Lean and Cleo Mayfield fluffing about the footlights in their familiar gabby fashion. Cecil does not forget he has teeth and Cleo cannot forget she's pretty and drawls.

6) Several burlesques, including an essay at making Spring Cleaning even more daring.

7) An ambitious chorus that pleases by its very energy.

8) A couple of comedians who try to squeeze humor out of the book by perspiring freely.

9) A book that does not exist.

Alexander Woollcott: "Mistinguett . . . that grand old lady of the Paris music halls . . . made an uneventful revue interesting."

E. W. Osborn: "Mistinguett proves herself a star of decided magnitude and one likely to shine for a long season."

John Corbin: "Built around Mistinguett. . . . As to the rest of Innocent Eyes, barring sundry showy costumes and considerable expert dancing, the least said the better."

Keep Kool. For an impression of this show, it is only necessary to wind up the foregoing and run it through the projection machine again. Simply substitute the names of Hazel Dawn, Charles King, and Johnny Dooley for those given. As its title implies, it aims at a summer mortgage on Broadway. Hence it has a chorus suitably prepared for sweltering weather.

That chorus is the vital element of the show. All its girls appear quite talented, and are allowed an opportunity to imitate the principals, sometimes to the principals' benefit. Miss Dawn plays a violin cheerfully, as in the days of The Pink Lady, and vents her acting ability on several skits that besplatter the show. Author Paul Gerard Smith comes out of vaudeville with an itch to thrust satire at his audience. His travesties of The Hairy Ape, Ladies' Night and The Song and Dance Man will work no harm to Eugene O'Neill, Avery Hopwood and George M. Cohan.

Percy Hammond: "A fleet caper, built for speed rather than luxury . . . containing velocity, sugary music, pretty girls in chemises and out of them, funny burlesques."

John Corbin: "A little of it is quite notably above the average in idea, and there are not more than two or three times that it sinks into the abyss of the commonplace."

I'll Say She Is. This is the first of the regular summer shows. The Four Marx Brothers, members of the Old Guard of vaudeville, keep it careering along with an unflagging versatility that not even temperature can slacken. The theatregoer can enjoy the production with his whole diaphragm.

Far from subtle, the Marx Brothers will belabor anything over the head to get a laugh. But they are object lessons to other low comedians in the technique of whacking out merriment. In the course of the evening they have the audience in stitches merely by jumping on the furniture.

Two of the Marxes are accomplished musicians, knowing accurately how to inject melody into the proceedings when the hokum seems in danger of wearing itself out. Leonard Marx plays classical music on the piano with an occasional reversion to mischievous tricks of the chopsticks variety. Moon-faced Arthur Marx wears a red wig, keeps the audience convulsed as he sidles about in utter silence, lets the soul of an artist escape through his fingers upon the harp. The scene wherein wisecracking Julius Marx plays the harassed Napoleon, is very funny.

The production is otherwise notable for the appearance of Lotta Miles, Kelly-Springfield tire girl, now rolling her whoops on the stage. Miss Miles, sumptuous blonde, knows how to use a becoming mezzo-soprano, and provides good cushioning in support of the comedians. Aside from this and a Chinese Apache dance, the revue runs the customary course with stereotyped music through Chinatown and the land where dresses come true. Its title means nothing.

Percy Hammond: "Bully show for any audience that has a sense of expert buffoonery."

New York Evening Post: "Every time the revue sagged to the depths of the spectacularly inept, some member of the Marx family came along and kidded it back into shape."

Round the Town. Manhattan critics were hard put to deal adequately with this new summer show. It was sponsored by two newspaper friends, (S. Jay Kaufman and Herman J. Mankeiwicz) and its bright particular star was another critic, Heywood Broun. Class consciousness bade the critics stick together. But in view of the rather uninspiring consequences the reviewers will do well to pass an unwritten law forbidding critics to participate in any such future high jinks.

Broun was the high light of the performance, lumbering out on the stage in dinner jacket. He delivered a fairly entertaining monologue touching on his feeling as an actor, and his new-found charity toward this breed hereafter. Harry Fox and Gloria Foy did their best to gambol, but while the material was rather promising, it seemed staged in an absent-minded manner.

Percy Hammond: "A lot of funny fellows getting together and being not quite so funny as expected--it fails, as the cooks say, to jell."

New York Evening Post: "So light that a stiff breeze across Central Park might blow it away. . . . Mr. Broun . . . floated gently in the hither atmosphere and aided, rather than the aeration."

The Best Plays

These are the plays which, in the light of metropolitan criticism, seem most important:

Drama

RAIN--Jeanne Eagels still presents powerfully this study of the revivalistic complex showing itself up in Pago Pago.

THE OUTSIDER--Lionel Atwill and Katherine Cornell medicate a stagey play with their acting till it thrives as a real drama.

COBRA--A lividly frank study of an athlete trying to shuffle off this mortal coil of sex.

THE WONDERFUL VISIT--A wistful bit of H. G. Wells and St. John Ervine, wherein a fallen angel finds the world hard to crack.

SAINT JOAN--Bernard Shaw really extends himself to do the Maid of Orleans a good turn.

Comedy

THE SHOW-OFF--A life-size pastel portrait of a gabby American at full blast.

EXPRESSING WILLIE--A smart yet human dissection of the urge to parade one's ego under the banner of Self-Expression.

BEGGAR ON HORSEBACK--The need for more geniuses and fewer captains of industry impishly expounded.

THE GOOSE HANGS HIGH--Tolerant comedy. Permits the younger generation to kiss the hand that spanked it.

FATA MORGANA--Saucy comedy. Exhibits the effect of the heat of the grand passion for one night on the half-baked young mind.

THE POTTERS--Proves likeably that the average dub is still maintaining his average.

MEET THE WIFE--A felicitous exposition of what happens when a wife tries to rule not only one husband, but two.

CYRANO DE BERGERAC--Walter Hampden erects his own unforgettable memorial to Rostand.

THE SWAN--An engaging picture of royalty treating itself to the universal luxury of a family squabble.

THE NERVOUS WRECK--A convulsive but amusing farce, with a new man arising out of the dust of broken crockery and shattered health.

Musical

Out of the hopper of musical comedy pour the following shows for light summer use: Stepping Stones, Plain Jane, Kid Boots, Chariot's Revue, Lollipop, Keep Kool, I'll Say She Is, Innocent Eyes.