New Plays
Ghosts. Ibsen's tragedy employing a pathological mishap as symbol of the hideous immorality that easily hides beneath "respectability," is familiar to Broadway. Last year it was done, and the year before and. . . . The plot is taken up with the attempt to build an orphan asylum in honor of Chamberlain Alving, deceased, the while his son's brain softens from inherited syphilis. As a play it is remarkable less for its profundity than for the technical mastery with which it swells through a gorgeous crescendo to a thunderclap climax. Interpretation of the Mrs. Alving's role by Minnie Maddern Fiske, 61, is different. What is usually a sad, ironical figure, she turns into a deftly satirical one. Though affording Mrs. Fiske's admirers an opportunity to exclaim once again over her genius for discovering comedy in almost any kind of situation, it failed to accord with the sombre mood of a drama of doom. Theodore St. John, as Oswald of the softening brain, convincing at times, seemed entirely too self-possessed in the crisis.
Bye, Bye, Bonnie is the usual musical comedy unusually well done. Its best features: the acting of Dorothy Burgess who strives seriously to smile success through this her first musical comedy role; an excellently trained chorus; the song " 'Cross the River from Queens." The plot: a Dry millionaire soap manufacturer, arrested in a night club, switches to the Wets after a month in jail, with such success that he is elected to Congress, and his daughter and pet office girl are free to marry their respective tenors. Bide Dudley (dramatic critic of the N. Y. Evening World) and Louis Simon (actor in the play) wrote the book, worked in many a laugh, also insinuated a jail scene, one of those atrociously vulgar burlesques on sex perversion so popular this year. It was greeted enthusiastically, justifying entirely the discretion of the writers. The audience left the theatre whistling " 'Cross the River . . ." in a thousand different keys, in uniformly cheerful spirit.
American Grand Guignol. One might expect the French horror-plays, in view of the season's successful exploitation of all phases of sex perversion, to prove fascinating box-office material. Not so. Perhaps it is because the theatre is way down in one of the Greenwich Village nooks of inaccessibility; possibly because one-act plays do not sell in Manhattan; possibly, also, because the production is heavyhanded. In one play, a paralytic suddenly discovers he has the ability to strangle daughter-in-law, which he does with gusto. In another, choice Chinese diabolisms are dramatized. On the whole, there is a great deal of cruelty with a minimum of refinement.
Tommy. Playwrights Howard Lindsay and Bertrand Robinson have hit upon an intriguing situation: a boy in love with a girl, the girl in love with him, the wedding bells dumb because the girl's parents also favor the match. Once the hero succeeds in irritating the parents into objecting, the heroine's vast desire for a gesture of romantic rebellion is gratified and the wedding accomplished. What the playwrights have done with this tempting situation is, first, to build up an impressive number of ingenious but superficial complications, explaining each little complication as it approaches, when it arrives, after it has departed, so that not the least in the audience will be deprived of his mite; then, to sugar-coat the whole with a lovable uncle who pets the cat and helps along the matrimony. When Broadway's last niece and nephew have chortled with childish glee over Tomany, it will probably be seized upon by all the stock companies throughout the land. Juvenile William Janney, Ingenue Peg Entwistle, Character Actors Lloyd Neal and Sidney Toler do well.
Piggy features Sam Bernard for the many who find joy in his sputtering-and-raging farcicality In this instance, as the plutocratic Mr. Hoggenheimer, he is bent upon forcing his son to marry a title but finally consents to true love with a shop girl. The best part of the show is the dancing chorus. Few stages can boast such dashing sweeps of color and movement. John Boyle created them.
The Arabian Nightmare is frankly a "fantastic comedy" (i.e. farce) of two variously aged spinstresses who quit Amesbury, Mass., for a glimpse of sheiks and harems in the desert. There they are tumbled about by means of a superabundance of stage gags so long standardized that the Manhattan first nighters knew just where to laugh. The surprise of the performance was Helen Lowell. In the serious part of the wife in God Loves Us earlier this season she won praise. Now she comes prancing on to the stage in a comic swimming suit, her face plastered with cosmetic mud.