New Plays in Manhattan

Veils. This is a play about twin sisters. One of them began her career in a convent and then, troubled and restless, sought the world. The other, a criminal woman, deserted the world after an erratic career and became entirely lulled by the soft silences of the nunnery. The play veered from beautiful and sensitive writing to a moral gibberish which can best be described as nunsense. The allegorical value of its eleven episodic scenes was of no great consequence. One or two of them, notably those which attempted to reproduce the atmosphere of a Catholic retreat, were thoroughly effective.

Twelve Thousand. Everyone knows that the web of history is spun by a spider, that wars are lost with a horseshoe nail. Therefore it is not hard to be convinced by this gentle and determined fable wherein Bruno Frank explains why it was that a greedy German prince did not sell 12,000 of his peasants to fight for England in the War of the Revolution. Piderit, the prince's secretary, is a wise, gloomy and sardonic patriot who does not wish to see these helpless mercenaries, among them his two brothers, driven away to fight a foreign war. He borrows a seal from the prince's pretty mistress and sends a plea to King Frederick of Prussia. This just and apparently omnipotent ruler puts an end to the avaricious plot of His Serene Highness, the Prince, causing this character to have a spasm of rage. Piderit and his brothers fare, for peaceful reasons, to the wide, delicious and enduring freedom of the U. S.

The 12,000 drafted soldiers are not, fortunately, ever allowed an access to the stage; there are no mob scenes or speeches from the window. But the sound of the soldiers' voices is heard and their fifers play gay tunes in the expectation of disaster. A sputter of rockets goes up, at night, for a last and tragic parade. Confused, threatening, alive, these sounds sift into the shadowed room which is the stage; a room in which there has been caught, by some soft and secret charm of writing, by the clever playing of Mary Ellis and Basil Sydney, the intimate mystery of the past.

The Buzzard. John Collier was dead. Of that there could be no doubt whatever. But the members of the cast of Broadway's newest murder play thought that if they pretended John Collier was still alive, his murderer would reappear to investigate. So they pretended, as hard as and as long as they could. Now and again, some one of them would claim to be the culprit until at last the true culprit admitted her identity. Then the audience, which had begun to imagine that it would have to wait for a death bed confession, trooped wearily away. There was a rumor that famed Tennis Player William Tatem Tilden Jr. would appear in The Buzzard. He went off to play tennis instead.

Henry the Fifth. Walter Hampden, in his delvings into the classic drama, happened upon this occasionally beautiful, often bombastic, box-office piece by William Shakespeare and produced it with all the whisperings, stampings, posturings and spur-clankings that generations of Shakespearian ragpickers in the acting profession have taught people to associate with the poetry of the immortal playwright. Certainly the foremost U. S. exponent of this orthodox and dignified procedure, Walter Hampden acts with his usual authority and vigor through the crashing, sometimes too sonorous story that has been visited upon the armies at Agincourt. Henry the Fifth will especially delight those who had read their Shakespeare often and who attend modern performances of his dramas largely because it will give them an opportunity of referring to Booth, Irving, and the way they could act in the good old days.

Killers. This melodrama has a message. Act I (common-place): murder is committed in the back room of a speakeasy. Act II (excellent): a jury blunders through the process of finding the wrong person guilty. Act III (bewildering): prisoners jabber in jail, attempt a mass escape with much pistol spitting. Act IV (stupid): how to get an electric chair ready and a last-minute confession.

With too much plot and 34 characters, Killers misses fire. Its message: "We are all murderers at heart."

The Three Musketeers. Dull is the

operetta.*The Three Musketeers, a Florenz Ziegfeld operetta, has all the impedimenta of its kind; there are frequent pretty songs, enormous numbers of beautiful girls with too many clothes on, flocks of toe dancers who caper around the stage in wide skirts and bonnets. Equipped with dusters, they would look as if they had just jumped out of a can of glorified Dutch Cleanser. There is also a plot about Messrs. D'Artagnan, Athos, Aramis, and Porthos; they are serving the King of France to the best of their ability and making love to ladies. D'Artagnan himself makes a trip to England, to bring back a piece of jewelry that the Queen of France has given to the Duke of Buckingham.

There can be no doubt that this "musical version" of the novel of famed Author Alexandre Dumas is as good as any such production is likely to be. Mr. Ziegfeld, hitherto the most ardent sponsor of these things, has announced that he intends to produce no more of them.

*Except for the works of Sir William Schwenck Gilbert & Sir Arthur Seymour Sullivan, which are totally unlike all other light opera.