New Plays

George White's Scandals. Some like musical comedy hot, some like it bold, some like it well seasoned, so that they can understand the jokes. On the last score, no one can bicker with Mr. White. At least six of his japes must have been familiar to Grover Cleveland, but should that august and venerated gentleman return, for a few loose minutes, to visit the pit of a Manhattan theatre he would doubtless laugh roundly at them. For it is the peculiar genius of Mr. White to make an act out of an anecdote, to spin an innocent jest with pipe, tabor, scenery, and bring down his curtain on a guffaw. He does not spare expense. There is a notable scene wherein members of the chorus parade in a fur shop, clad in robes, scarfs, peignoirs, polonaises made of the furs of every creature from a seal to a mongoose; good syncopation by the McCarthy sisters; terrible singing by Gordon Dooley; two blackamorons, Miller and Lyles, who ably support the hypothesis that a real Negro can be funny on the stage; one tune, What a World This Would Be, which will be monkey-organ fodder before very long.

Artists and Models is a saturnalia that grows, each year, bigger, better, barer. This one is called the Paris Edition because the name Paris is, with Broadwayites, a synonym for limbs and confidential badinage. The badinage in this show, however, achieves wit; the lace is never where it is expected; and the limbs, particularly those of the Gertrude Hoffman girls, late of the Moulin Rouge, are exquisite, adept. Authors Harold Atteridge and Harry Wabstaff Gribble do not depend on the upholstery to make their lines agreeable; the art directing and music decidedly the most able that those penetrating students of public taste, the Messer Shubert, have ever paid for. There is, also, a funny man, one Phil Baker.

"I don't like stories," declared he. "I like riddles."

"You do?"

"Sure. Riddles and syrup."

"That's terrible. That's a pun."

"I like puns too."

"You do?"

"Sure. Puns and coffee."

At one point, a small town friend of his stands up in a box, causing 15 minutes of this and that. For those who receive impressions more readily with the eye than the ear, acts have been designed. "The Rotisserie," in which four girls, trussed on enormous spits, baste in front of an electric fire; "The Promenade Walk at the Beach" which sends 50 odd and some beautiful bathing suits skipping behind the rotund personality of Miss Frances Williams; the "Palette" scene, in which the Hoffman girls emerge, one by one, from a paint box, disguised as pastel crayons; "Cellini's Dream," difficult to describe. All these are transcended by the most colossal exploitation of the Mammy song ever attempted on the U. S. stage, a skit entitled "Mothers of the World." gentle matrons, in a series of cloistered niches, touched with a dim, a holy light, sing their infants asleep, while above their heads the prima donna, attired as a cherub, leads a choir of angels.