New Plays

Naughty Riquette. Into some nonsense about a naughty Parisian telephone operator who proves in Monte Carlo that she is honest, the Shuberts have cast two capable performers. Mitzi, light-footed, long-haired, emerges from the dim past to yodel stale lines with broad vocal nuances. About her plump, Hungarian person the show revolves. From Stanley Lupino, English comedian, it draws its light. This superb clown flashes one of the season's gems in his sensational disclosure of the shocking impotence of Calvin Coolidge, Alfred Smith and Lloyd George, none of whom can lay eggs, grow ostrich feathers, or sit like a house fly in the saccharine stickiness of a raspberry tart. The chorus of toe-dancers flit about in movements more airy than usual. Theatre-goers can hardly afford to miss Comedian Lupino. The rest is mediocre.

Henry's Harem. Before a perplexed audience at the Greenwich Village Theatre, an abortive theatrical creature flapped its uncoordinated parts. For two acts it fumbled with Henry's problem-- how to marry off three sisters in six months. Everything seems happily managed, when lo! into the third act comes an utterly unheralded complication--and Henry goes to the district attorney's office. It is gradually divulged that Henry, to adorn his sisters with a marital background, had bartered skim milk instead of cream. For no good reason he is released and the entire cast pairs off and marries, which is theatre for a happy ending. Al Roberts as a comedian gets no laughs.

Broadway. Into a poorer-than-average season strode the first unqualified success, Broadway, by Phillip Dunning, newcomer, and George Abbott, experienced collaborator, stage technician. Flimsy characterization amputates the play just short of greatness.

Off-stage cabaret dancers, unlovely, bawling, quarreling; on-stage cabaret dancers, lovely, smiling, gracious. Into this perennially intriguing background, stalk gangsters, murder, revenge, police, nicely offset by racy comic relief and a love affair between the show- off "hoofer" and his dancing sweetheart. The cast knows the life it is portraying; the authors know the life they are staging. The result is a meticulously realistic production, faithful even unto the garrulous hoofer's discarding his trousers before an unperturbed sweetheart.

Lee Tracy gives the best performance of his career as the show-off dedicated in spirit to a vaudeville dance at the Palace Theatre but delighted to serve in the McKeesport Opera House. Sylvia Field, late of The Little Spitfire, adorns the chorus as his honorably beloved, a good girl who "doesn't know her goulash." So vital is the background, so artfully sustained the suspense, that Broadway runs its entire length without one flagging moment.

Just Life. Vexed, Playwright John Bowie turned upon his critics. Said he in a neatly inserted advertisement : Gentlemen of the Press:

I thank you for your kind criticisms of my first play, "Just Life," at Henry Miller's Theatre.

JOHN BOWIE

The criticisms might well have mortified a less sensitive writer. Yet harshness was justified. The stuff of College Humor and True Stories must have cluttered Playwright Bowie's imagination--of such trashy quality is the life reflected in his play. In it appears Marjorie Rambeau as Madame Chase, one-time operatic star and idol of Europe's crowned heads; now, conjointly with amoral Mr. Chase, parent to Daughter Meg. Her husband forges checks, so Madame Chase must sing again. As if this were not enough, she must travel in a stateroom, where once a suite de luxe had been hardly grand enough. Here is a touch of the ironic reality suggested by the title. Madame Chase finally leaves her faithless husband for the he-Penelope who has waited 20 years for her. The problem of Daughter Meg is disposed of by marriage. Through it all runs a sad harmony of inevitable growing-old. In spite of Miss Rambeau, the play is such an obviously tin-pan symphony of life that to a sympathetic observer the most generous feeling possible, is embarrassment.