New Plays in Manhattan

Revelry pokes with ruthless imagination into the secret misfortunes of a President of the U. S. whom theatre-goers found it easy to think of as Warren Gamaliel Harding. The audience sees President "Easy" Markham (Actor Berton Churchill) as a stately tool of politicians who run the nation from a poker table stuck away in a private nook known as "the crow's nest." Because of his unwholesome faith in these cronies, he allows the White House to degenerate into what one of the characters described as an automat ("Because when you want to take something out, you just put in a coin"). When the graft is on the point of being exposed by a Senate investigation, President Markham, broken-hearted by his followers' duplicity, commits suicide, thus saving his own good name and the Party.

The play is annoyingly cut up into a string of episodes darkening the theatre and breaking its spell whenever.the audience begins to succumb to what might have been effective historical drama. It was written by Maurine Watkins, a young woman who last year attracted attention by a sound piece of debunking called Chicago. She took her material for Revelry from the novel by Samuel Hopkins Adams and for local color she went to Washington, moseyed about the lobby halls, chatted with the politicians, pried, snooped, took notes. To see Miss Watkins, whose beauty is fresh and sweet as the first blush of a primrose, one won- ders how she ever accumulated the authentic mass of profanity let loose in her play. Perhaps it is because she once wrote for a Chicago newspaper. Certainly it is not because she studied in Professor George P. Baker's class in dramatic composition at Yale.

Ten Per Cent is just about that successful. It tells about a Jewish butter-and-egg man who plays "angel" to a play so his daughter may be starred. One of the producers is Thomas Jackson, who functions as the detective in Broadway. The Triumphant Bachelor is a

smarty who proves to his married friends that any wife will lose faith in her husband after finding in his coat pocket a note signed "Love, Helen," or "Kisses, Eleanor." Then the bachelor almost gets into a jam with his own fiancee over these same transplanted notes. There are a few bright chips of dialog but they are hidden under a bushel of small talk. The playwright, Owen Davis, is credited with having written more than 100 plays.

'Yellow Sands. The English playgoer does not insist upon excitement to the extent that the U. S. playgoer does. Furthermore, the English are at present deeply concerned with almost any kind of tract on Bolshevism. These facts help to explain why this play by Eden Phillpotts* and his daughter Adelaide will probably not do for Manhattan as it did for London. It is a gentle treatise on Capitalism v. Bolshevism; and it proves its point (that Bolshevism is just "a bad smell from the Northeast") by holding up the case of a young fisherman in a snug seacoast village. Smouldering with indignation against the plutocrats, he flares up on all provocations to declare his ardent desire for revolution. Then his aunt dies, leaving him a fortune; and soon he looks upon the bright yellow sands of the seacoast, smiling instead of glowering. There is little sin and no shooting in the play, but the dialog and quaint characterization lend it quiet charm. My Maryland. When blond and youthful Barbara Frietchie from her balcony defied all her Southern friends and relatives by waving the Union flag in the face of Stonewall Jackson, she proved that her heart belonged to the wounded Yankee officer who lay at the point of death in her own boudoir. "March on," thundered General Jackson,* who forthwith clumped ostentatiously off the stage, while the Confederate Army followed with flags waving. Then the wounded Yankee staggered onto the balcony to clasp Barbara (Evelyn Herbert) to his heart and the curtain came down. In Manhattan the Civil War is a matter of politics rather than patriotism, so Manhattan will not be so easily aroused by a tenor in blue (Nathaniel Wagner) sawing the air with his sabre as was Phil- adelphia, where My Maryland had a successful run. In fact, the melo- dramatics are so naive that a rousing march song by Sigmund Rom- berg, accompanied by stagy gestures, failed of the usual operatic magic. It was hard to escape the feeling that a great crowd of chil- dren had left off "cowboys and Indians" to play Civil War.

Half a Widow is a musical show about the World War. As far as the War is concerned, one may well repeat the lackadaisical Moran's/- classical query, "Why did you bring that up?" The rest of it, however, is pretty good, especially the clowning of Bennie Rubin. Had it been produced a decade ago, when it was written, it might have been better.

The Wild Man of Borneo. No

great liar is entirely ignoble. J. Daniel Thompson, for instance, pretends for. the sake of his daughter's admiration, to be understudy to Richard Mansfield in Cyrano de Bergerac, whereas in reality he clanks chains and chews raw meat in the role of Wild Man at the 14th Street Palace of Living Wonders. Before that he was a vender of snake oil and Indian cure; and his compound sentences, derived from long professional practice, are rolled with an unctuous grandeur by George Hassell, who plays him to the last shake of his ponderous belly. You have the feeling that Thompson's lowly feathers are plucked from the same bird that gave Cyrano his white plume and that they are not much less pathetic for being so much more absurd. The audience wished only for something to happen to this charming old rogue to spur him out of what promised in the first two acts to be a bog of dialog. Baby Cyclone. Playwright George M. Cohan is an authority on husbands & wives. In his newest farce, he sets down that "whereas a woman has a whole bagful of tricks, a man has only one--the hat trick." This trick consists in the man's donning his hat and leaving his Mrs. alone for the night. It never fails. When three homes have been broken up by the three wives' passionately ogling and cuddling a little Pekinese dog, "Baby Cyclone" (so called because he was born in a storm), this simple "hat trick" succeeds in restoring the husbands to proper importance and the dog to the kennel.

Said Variety: "It should do for the Peke industry what The Captive did for violets."

The Mikado. Ever since his production last season of lolanthe, there has been a disposition among other producers to leave Gilbert & Sullivan to Winthrop Ames. How wise this policy is was demonstrated last week in the most tuneful of the Savoyard operettas, The Mikado. This opera is the one in which NankiPoo (William Williams), son of the Mikado of Japan (John Barclay), disguises himself as a wandering minstrel to woo Yum-Yum (Lois Bennett), ward and fiancee of the Lord High Executioner Ko-Ko (Fred Wright). By crossing the palm of the stately grafter, Pooh-Bah (William Gordon), whose ancestry is so proud that he was "born sneering," they avoid one tangle of legal red tape only to discover themselves enmeshed in another. Not till the exalted Mikado himself descends upon the scene does the complication resolve itself into matrimony.

A remarkable thing about this Mikado is the way it is staged. It has been sadly proved in the past that W. S. Gilbert's beautiful silliness that makes such alarming good sense when you come to think it over, and Arthur Sullivan's beguiling music can degenerate into oppressive bores. Mr. Ames sees to it that the stage keeps moving. His Mikado skips over huddles of prostrate subjects. His sonorous aristocrat, Pooh-Bah, is tantalized by lively, romping girls. The color combinations change and move, too, so vividly that the performance could fascinate a deaf-mute. Be sides there is a company of actors with unusually fine voices who have understanding hearts for the blithe spirit of Gilbert & Sullivan. Manhattan holds no sightlier, more in- telligent playfulness than theirs.

After the Mikado has run for several weeks, Mr. Ames will switch his company back to lolanthe and The Pirates of Penzance, thus beginning the repertory program of the Winthrop Ames Gilbert & Sullivan Opera Co.

*Eden Phillpotts has written many successful novels and plays. Among them: Children of the Mist, Knock at a Venture, Circe's Island, Devonshire Cream, The Farmer's Wife.

*To suit the altered character of Barbara Frietchie, Whittier's line: Who touches a hair of yon grey head Dies like a dog. March on!" he said was changed to Anybody who harms a, hair of that girl's head Dies like a dog. Pass the word along."

/-Moran & Mack are blackface comedians whose famed phonograph record, "Two Black Crows," contains many a line which Cental parasites delight to quote and requote.