New Plays

Mrs. Partridge Presents. The managing mother who manages to misfire completely in the last act is the portrait around which a number of smaller portraits are tastefully distributed. The smaller portraits are mostly her children and their friends. The misfire is the pardonable reluctance of her children to tread the pathways of artistic life which she has broken for them.

An artist and an actress her boy and girl shall be. Years of toil go into the proper nourishing of their temperaments. The boy prefers engineering; the girl, matrimony. Mother loses.

Blanche Bates offered her usual determined and consciously complete performance. Elliott Cabot who, with Robert Benchley, is the most promising of the younger Harvard actors, made a keen impression on the critics. Quite the best of the troupe was Ruth Gordon (Lola Pratt in Seventeen). She wandered in occasionally as the little girl from up the street and quite pulled the play from the grasp of the Partridge family.

Jack in the Pulpit. Robert Ames, who has given two excellent performances in The Hero and Icebound, is now the defendant on two serious charges. Item: He has become a manager. Item: He has produced a fearful play. In fact, he has produced one of the season's worst. Which, in this scrambled season, is almost a distinction.

Mr. Ames interprets the role of a crook who will inherit an immoderate amount of millions if he becomes for one year the pastor of a village church. After introducing to his astonished flock golf, jazz and auction bridge, after falling in love with the inevitable sweet and simple maiden, he reforms.

Marion Coakley, lured somehow into this dramtic litter, plays well ahead of her materials. Mr. Ames adds little to his established reputation. Most of the subordinates were valueless.

Othello. Walter Hampden is one of the most serious laborers for the better things of the Theatre. He is one of the few curators of the old things that are best. Therefore, when he brings back Othello, the honesty of his effort, the stimulation that such a play must give our stage is to be commended without stint. Granting, however, the sincerity and ambition of the effort, it must be said that Othello is in many places dull.

In the first place, Mr. Hampden's version stretches across three hours and 30 minutes of the watcher's time. The play is simply not sufficiently invigorating to sustain the stubborn interest of the casual attendant. In the second place, the interpretation of Mr. Hampden, scholarly and earnest as it is, seems somehow to fail the Moor. He plays Othello resonantly and with determination. Always he plays it; never does he bring the suffering soldier to life. Furthermore, the Desdemona of Jeannette Sherwin is distinctly under standard. Iago (Baliol Holloway, Englishman) gives a curiously individual, irritating and yet undeniably admirable performance.

For people to whom any Shakespeare presentation is an educational essential, the production will be enormously worth while. To the rank and file who crowded so enthusiastically to Mr. Hampden's Cyrano de Bergerac, it is doubtful if Othello will abundantly appeal.

Stark Young--"Admirable part of this Othello was the spirit . . . everywhere evident a long study and a great ideal for the Theatre."

Is Zat So. Quite without warning a group of previously undistinguished actors chipped the shell off a hard boiled comedy and threw it in most amusing pieces to a greedy and appreciative audience. It was not the type of appreciation that Mr. Hampden or Mrs. Fiske would prize; it was the type of laughter whose artistic values are confined solely to the green and yellow curlicues which decorate U. S. Government currency.

The acrid commentary and allusion which flows from the narrow lips of a prize fighter's manager reflects most of the merriment. This manager and his deplorably dense lightweight are abruptly added to the menial quota of a haughty home on Fifth Avenue. They fall in love with others of the servants; they stir up a resounding second-act fight that would do credit to any picture play; they win the love match and the lightweight championship of the world.

James Gleason, coauthor, gave a performance of vigorous vulgarity as the prize fight manager. Some of the Fifth Avenue accessories were rather startling, but the tough parts were swell.

Big Boy. It is established now that Al Jolson is the most valuable entertainer in the world. It is established that he, more than any living man or woman, can summon the audience to the palm of his white-gloved hand and hold it there. To his enemies--and he has a few--these statements will seem absurd. Survey of the reception he received in Big Boy guarantees them none the less.

The piece is a departure from the Jolson custom in that it has a plot. The comedian portrays the character of a darkey jockey who rides a colt named Big Boy and wins the last-act race. This framework displays no sensational originality. It is shrewdly made to carry the star's efforts, always feeding them and taking little for itself. The company is large and generally competent. Yet, it is upon the magnificent vitality, the bright and sometimes bawdy wit, the shift to a swift flash of pathos, the surpassing magnetism of Mr. Jolson that the show depends.

Percy Hammond--."The People's Voice."

Alexander Woollcott -- "Refreshed, magnificent, capable of rocking the Winter Garden with an ancient laughter and flooding it with the rue and the tenderness of an ancient art."

Lass O' Laughter. Flora Le Breton, London actress, has arrived in a comedy that is a mixture of Bertha M. Clay* and lemon meringue pie. She starts as a slavey, advances via an inheritance to the lordly Maxwell Towers, marries the glistening young Earl. So oldfashioned, obvious and generally fallible is the piece that there remain only the efforts of Miss Le Breton for discourse. She is called "the Mary Pickford of England." Many cinema potentates were in the initial audience to judge her values. She turned out to be a small and somewhat fluffy blonde, abounding in energy and a somewhat aggressive winsomeness. With careful direction and the selection of a play in which she will not be called upon for such consistent quaintness, her name should multiply moderately upon people's lips.

* British Laura Jean Libbey,