New Plays

The Ritz Revue. About once a season or less, there trudges into town a revue that scorns comparison. Usually it is The Music Box. Though that estimable entertainment has not yet made its entry, there are a good many people willing to wager right now that it will not even jar The Kits Revue on its presiding pinnacle. The Ritz Revue is by 20 or 30 laps the best revue in town.

The artificers who put the piece to gether (chiefly Hassard Short and Al Jolson) reversed the usual process. They started with humor, gorged their program with it and then turned their attention to music, dancing and color.

Taste domineered. There are no tidal waves of gorgeousness washing about the walls. The sets are small, the color cunningly conceived, the effect brilliant. The chorus is limited to pretty girls, each with a dancing specialty. Madeline Fairbanks (a Fairbanks twin) was their commanding officer. Tom Burke and his more or less grand opera voice man aged the more important music.

Charlotte Greenwood, the skyscraping comedienne, collected the fullest gusts of laughter. Raymond Hitchcock, usually in monologue and at one point in his underclothes, was as of old. Primarily important, however, was the return of Jay Brennan, who will be recalled as the partner of boisterous Bert Savoy.* He has a new partner, one Rogers, who has assumed the clothing, voice and mannerisms of Savoy. When the votes were counted, the assembly had voted him almost as funny.

The Greenwich Village Follies. John Murray Anderson equipped his painting staff with riot guns and trained the batteries on the scenery. The result was what is so very often known in discussions of musical revues as "a riot of color." There is another type of riot that is referred to, usually in the advertisements--"a riot of fun." As a riot of fun, The Greenwich Village Follies is one of the most depressingly orderly exhibitions that has arrived this fall. There are various interludes that are devised apparently for the promotion of laughter among the visitors. The visitors failed to laugh.

Here an exception must be made. There is a pair of comedians connected with the festivities, Moran and Mack by name. They were funny. They were so brilliantly and devastatingly funny that they easily ran away with the show. They are blackface. They have long been popular in vaudeville. Unfortunately they appear only twice.

The high spots were the Dolly Sisters and the twisting strains of Vincent Lopez's band.

Izzy. When Abie's Irish Rose appeared (a play which last week reached its 1,000th performance in Manhattan-- the only play beside Lightnin' to achieve this distinction), it will be recalled that the critics held up their hands in horror; right-minded people refused to go; authorities predicted dire things of witnesses who could enjoy it. Abie has had numerous imitators, of which Izzy is probably the best.

Izzy is frankly a Semitic entertainment, divulging how an aggressive Jewish youth can rise to the top of the film industry in something less than no time. He makes a promise to his uncles in the first act. And, lo and behold, in the third act his promise is fulfilled. . . .

Schemers. The most enthuisastic single flurry of applause that greeted this strange production on the opening night welcomed the entrance of a character in the play--a theatrical critic, A. Wood Brown by name. The applause volleyed from a single pair of hands which upon investigation proved to be those of Heywood Broun, critic of The New York World. The other critics sat more stolidly in their chairs and watched their effigies burned among the ruins of a singularly tedious display.

My Son. When the son turned out to be a thief, the mother turned out to save him. He was in love with a flapper whose heart resembled cut glass. The mother was in love with Felipe Vargas from the Azores. The Sheriff also loved her. The family were humble Portuguese; and the locale, Provincetown.

From this blueprint, the playwright, Martha Stanley, contrived to set up a creditable and generally interesting structure. Most entertaining was the contrast of the Latin temperament against a New England background.

The Best Plays

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

Drama

COBRA--Spectators have been stirred these several months by Judith Anderson's display of the snake-charmer charmed by the snake.

WHITE CARGO--Souls dry-rotting and flaking off before the withering loneliness of Africa.

WHAT PRICE GLORY--Strong men, strong words, strong drink as the Marines knew them close to the trenches.

CONSCIENCE--A patchily important play energized beyond itself, thanks to a magnificent performance by Lillian Foster.

RAIN--Edward of Wales paid Jeanne Eagels the conclusive compliment of seeing no other actress or play.

THE MIRACLE--Still weaving its medieval mystery in the gloomy cathedral fastnesses of the Century Theatre.

Comedy

THE SHOW-OFF--Wherein the low brow and the loud mouth are satirized with the keenest scalpels of the show-shops.

FATA MORGANA--Emily Stevens and the Theatre Guild are daringly diverting in a Continental love story by Vajda.

EXPRESSING WILLIE--So successful a satire of modern youth and his artistic temperament that subsidiary companies are about to branch into other cities.

THE WEREWOLF--In which just about everything is said out loud on a subject usually reserved for whispering.

Musical

Some have persisted from last season; some are new; all are good: Ritz Revue, Kid Boots, Rose-Marie, The Dream Girl, The Passing Show, I'll Say She Is, Ziegfeld Follies, George Whites Scandals, Stepping Stones, The Grand Street Follies.

*Boisterious Bert Savoy, famed female impersonator and Captain of the team of Savoy and Brennan, had an unending stock of anecdotes about a certain friend of his known as "Margie," which he delivered in a most babbling, flirtatious manner. He died in July, 1923, struck by lightning at Long Beach, L. I.