New Plays in Manhattan

A La Carte, In the opening number, the Master of Ceremonies announced that Miss Rosalie Stewart's-- revue is called A La, Carte, because, out of the variety of offerings served, the audience is requested to take what it likes and leave the rest. That is a capital idea. Unfortunately theatrical limitations impose upon Miss Stewart's revue, as indeed upon all others, the table d'hote principle. You cannot taste her chicken and custard without swallowing her bean soup and sauerkraut in the same performance. There is, first of all, a dancer, Harriet Hoctor, who, as a fairy doll, breezes across the stage like melody and floats away on a fancy that all the rest of mankind is clopping through life with one foot in a mud bog. George Kelly, who is perhaps the most deadly propagandist among U. S. playwrights, provided sketches which, artfully unclimactic, bore the audience into fierce exasperation by faithfully recording the yapping on the veranda of a summer hotel, a golf course, a theatrical dressing-room. These are food enough for entertainment. For the nut course, there are clowns.

Babies A La Carte. One of those stage wills decrees the fortune shall go to that one of two cousins, both ardent birth control advocates, who bears the first baby. Both ladies become flustered, flutter through stereotyped agonies, while the rest of the cast flourish jests too frayed to crack.

The Greenwich Villagers, in their own little theatre on Grove Street, parade the Truth that nothing is less likely to succeed as professional entertainment than an amateurish revue.

Footlights is another play about the show business. It holds up to ridicule the efforts of a shoe-string producer to turn out a musical comedy. There are dress rehearsal scenes, dressing-room scenes, scenes where the effeminate stage manager fumes. After all is set for the opening night, the actor who plays the part of the producer holds up his hands in dismay, cries: "What a terrible flop ... I don't believe we'll live till Saturday!" Thereupon the real audience at the Lyric Theatre mocked him with loud applause.

Tenth Avenue. Before the World War broke them up, the Hudson Dusters were a well-knit gang of gunmen and thieves who infested the west front of Manhattan, near Tenth Avenue. Such devilry was constantly sizzling and boiling up here, that the neighborhood became known as "Hell's Kitchen." In this lurid milieu, Playwrights John McGowan and Lloyd Griscom elected to set their play, although, as subsequently developed, they might as logically have fixed upon the Bronx.

Lyla Mason (played by Edna Hibbard, onetime prong-tongued brunette of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes) dashes in and out of her parlor as the Bright Angel of a Hell's Kitchen boarding house, constantly exhorting her tenants to "go straight." But when Lyla runs short of the rent money, Gambler Peters (Frank Morgan) reverts to poker and Elzy Everett (played by William Boyd, onetime hard-boiled sergeant in What Price Glory) shoots Star Boarder Fink. Just before the hairy-fisted detectives beat their way into the parlor, one of the tenants blurts out "Fink's been killed!" whereupon Elzy laconically observes: "Well, he wuz leavin' tomorrer anyhow, wasn't he?" When Lyla discovers that Elzy, after all her effort, has proved unregenerate, she kisses him goodby, pats his handcuffs and marries the reformed gambler. It is as far from Hell's Kitchen as Paradise, but the acting and the slang make it seem human.

Ziegfeld Follies. For 21 years Florenz Ziegfeld has produced the Follies according to one formula: to frame the most beautiful show girls discoverable against the most gorgeous backgrounds conceivable. His formula has never failed. But as nothing subscribes more unreservedly to the law of diminishing returns than succession of splendors, this last superbly heralded Follies achieves only another anticlimax. 'Though Eddie Cantor (eyes big as baseballs, and lugubrious) paces the stage with a repertory of "wisecracks," the tone of metropolitan criticism seemed to be, condescendingly: "The Ziegfeld Follies is the world's most beautiful dumb show."

This is true but not adequate. A monumental monotony deserves more detailed appraisal. One should remember that the great showmen, Max Reinhardt (TIME, Aug. 22), on his first visit to the U. S., sneaked away from Morris Gest's invitation to see a Belasco drama, in order to enjoy the Follies, in which possibly he saw an effete magnificence succeeding Barnum's loud-checkered display as the most typical product of U. S. theatre.

"The Follies Girl" crowns the show. So carefully is she picked that rumors go abroad that each candidate must be inspected in the nude. That is an exaggeration. An expert perceives enough from a girl's walk; knee-length skirts simplify selection. Furthermore a call for the Ziegfeld Follies will bring out the best chorines in the business. They throng the stage-doors, present themselves in one-piece bathing suits. When the "impossibles" have been weeded out, Mr. Ziegfeld himself picks the types he needs. Most of his girls are already lined up. Alert friends have sent him a redhead with white skin, a statuesque blonde, a languorous brunette, a bouncing, black-eyed pony.-- Mr. Ziegfeld would no sooner stand two tow-heads in a row than suffer his dancers to lose their balance or his orchestra to play out of tune.

In general, his girls must have straight shoulders, slim hips. Thus proportioned, they can be draped more gracefully, can ripple their silks more slyly than bulging beauties. Once "glorified," they stand toward other chorus girls in the same relation that an editorial writer of the courtly New York Times stands to an editorial writer of the scurrilous (porno) Graphic.

Ziegfeld Embattled. So long has Florenz Ziegfeld been intent upon glorifying the American girl that he is beginning to take his Follies with grim earnestness. Near the head of the new program is stamped a legend fit for a crusade: "'He who glorifies Beauty glorifies Truth', with Eddie Cantor, Lyrics by Irving Berlin," etc.

Last winter, when censors were agitated against The Captive, The Virgin Man, Sex, Mr. Ziegfeld came out with an unsolicited attack upon the modern revue. "The state of the modern American revue, which I originated, is deplorable. Nudity and immorality are rampant. I pledge my honor that the American people will find nothing suggestive or unclean in my shows and I do not want the run of present day revues to be confused in the public mind with the Ziegfeld Follies, which glorifies the American girl."

Many people (including George White) saw in this an attack upon George White's Scandals, which at that time was the greatest attraction in Manhattan. The Scandals girl, unlike her Follies colleague, is on the stage for frank sex appeal, not glorification. She runs to "the good old-fashioned type"--broad-hipped, round, full. She does not dress so well as the slim girl but she undresses, perhaps, better, and most of the time she is reduced to bare essentials.

Possibly this irritation against a production which was succeeding at the same time that Betsy, a Ziegfeld show, was failing, grew out of an old wound. Nine years ago George White "hoofed" in the Follies. Ambitious, he started out to produce his own show, which met at first with slight success, whereupon Mr. Ziegfeld, annoyed by the audacity of competition, wired him an offer to go back to work on the Follies at an ignominious salary. George White retaliated by offering Mr. Ziegfeld's wife, Billie Burke, a part in his next show at a salary even more ignominious. Thus, what might have been just business competition turned into a picturesque feud.

The Ziegfeld-White conflict really has a more profound cause than personal tiffs. 'These two stand as representatives of opposing principles in revue production. One principle: a revue should consist of a series of snappy acts, punctuated for relief by chorus girls. The other: a revue should be a spectacle, punctuated for relief by snappy acts. Of the first, Charlot's Revue may be cited as an example of the informal type, George White's Scandals, the sumptuous. Of the second, the Ziegfeld Follies is exemplar without peer.

Players' Presidency

From a large oil painting fixed in the sedate gloom of The Players' Club, Edwin Booth, first president, looks down. To see him with woeful eye, in the sombre trappings of a past generation, one might imagine that he' is distracted by the dissension which, together with sadness, has come to the club through the death of its late president, John Drew.

Since its founding in 1888, The Players have had only three presidents (Edwin Booth, Joseph Jefferson, John Drew) each of whom has served for life. Now The Players must elect another.

Otis Skinner, vice president, acting head, would ordinarily be the legal choice. But Mr. Skinner is a militant member of the Actors' Fidelity League; most of the Players are members of the rival Actors' Equity Association. They prefer, therefore, a member of their own group, Francis Wilson. To elect him, they must go to some pains, for Actor Wilson is not a member of the board of directors from which the chief executive must be chosen. The Players, however, could elect him to the board at the same time they elect him to the presidency.

Walter Hampden, who, possibly, could eliminate the issue by accepting the candidacy for the office, does not choose to run.

And E. H. Sothern, another possibility, "is in England so much of the year."

In London

Unlike Manhattan, which keeps its art respectable by means of the criminal code, London has a personal censor--the Lord Chamberlain. When Potiphar's Wife was announced for London's Globs Theatre last week, the Lord Chamberlain, alert, notified the producers that those invidious passages in the Bible from which the play takes its name must not be incorporated in the dialog. Compliant, the producers deleted the passages, printed them on strips of paper slipped between the program leaves.* Even so, London was shocked at the play. There were purple passages (not Biblical); there was the actress, Jeanne De Casalis, in pajamas from which the producer had ordered the sleeves and lining stripped. Said Herbert Griffith in the Evening Standard: "I thought up to last night that I was unshockable but found I wasn't."

* One of the most successful of women impresarios, who began with vaudeville productions, through which she learned to appreciate the ability of George Kelly, to whose plays she devotes nearly all her activity. Among them: The Torchbearers, The Showoff, Craig's Wife, Daisy Mayme.

* A pony is a small chorus girl, usually sent out with a squad of other small chorus girls, and expected to dance pertly, smartly, trippingly, with great vivacity.

* Invidious passages: GENESIS XXXIX, 12: And she [Potiphar's wife] caught him [Joseph] by his garment saying, Lie with me: and he left his garment in her hand, and fled, and got him out. 13: And it came to pass, when she saw that he had left his garment in her hand, and was fled forth, 14: That she called unto the men of her house, and spake unto them, saying, See, he hath brought in a Hebrew unto us to mock us; he came in unto me to lie with me, and I cried with a loud voice: 15: And it came to pass, when he heard that I lifted up my voice and cried, that he left his garment with me, and fled and got him out.