The New Season

(See front cover)

Long before the first golden-rod grows bright in far away fields, the yellow lights of the new season are raised above Broadway. By September, usually, the first hit has arrived in town; the streets off Times Square are crammed with stage folk who hope this winter not to play Des Moines; the dramatic critics, yellow and sick from uncustomary contact with the sun, are once more being kittenish on the keys. At the centre of all this glittering activity are the producers; it depends upon them whether the new year shall be tawdry or delightful.

There are in New York only about a dozen really important producers. Their names remain fixed while those of actors shine and grow dark. David Belasco, Lee Shubert and his brother Jake, Sam Harris, "Ziggy," the Selwyns, George M. Cohan, Winthrop Ames, William A. Brady, A. H. Woods, George White, Dillingham--everyone who sees plays or reads about them has heard of these. There is only one new man among the first-line producers. Younger than the rest but equally successful, he took it easy last week while others were in a ferment of excitement, getting their new offerings ready for the stage. Having already supplied Broadway with the first success of the season, The Front Page, he stated erroneously that he was through producing plays, went to the country, and contemplated not the future but the past.

His past, as such, was pleasant. Jed Harris, ne Jacob Horowitz, could not remember when his family came from Vienna to live in Newark, N. J. But he could remember living there, in a small and hideous house, and going to high school to get ready for college. Of Yale, too, he had pleasant memories. Not the nostalgic memories of a college hero but the more delicious, spiteful recollection of unpopularity among those whom he has since surpassed. At Yale, Jake Horowitz was not the type. After two years, he left Yale and went to Europe.

There was, just after the War, some difficulty in sending money from the U. S. to certain states in the interior of Europe. To insure safety, people who wanted to do so entrusted their currency to travelers rather than the mails. Jake Horowitz got the notion that it might be profitable to act as a paid courier for this purpose and set out, with several companions, to do so. By the time the party reached Paris, they were broke. When they drew lots to see which one should stay in Paris instead of going further, Horowitz got the short straw. Paris, he knew, was no place for a Yale French scholar to live in, so he went to London and stayed there among the chop suey dishes and Chinese laundries of the Limehouse district. When he came back to the U. S., he was a stowaway in the stoker's forecastle of a tramp ship.

In Manhattan again, he started out to write for the Clipper, famed, defunct, theatrical paper. When he left, he said, "Now I'll be a producer," a remark which was supposed to annoy the editor but instead only made him laugh. Jake Horowitz became a producer of publicity for the Shuberts, Mark Klaw and Richard Herndon. At this racket, he was good enough to make $3,000 which he speedily sank in his first production, The Romantic Age by A. A. Milne, a flop. He heard someone comment on the name above "Presents" on the program, and changed it to Jed Harris. Next he wheedled enough more backing to put on Weak Sisters, which showed a small profit. After that he met George Abbott, co-author of Love 'Em and Leave 'Em, which he produced. Love 'Em and Leave 'Em was a smash.

Since then "Jed Harris" has been on the list with the rest of the big-timers. Broadway, Coquette, The Royal Family, played together for a while on Broadway. Now Broadway has gone and The Front Page has taken its place.

A great many people know Jed Harris and a great many of the people that know him like him. He has a way, though, of hurting people's feelings, especially those of the people that work for him, by showing them how their jobs ought to be done. If on such occasions he did their work clumsily, it might make him popular. He does it well and then, with an obtuseness common to most intelligent and sensitive persons, forgets to apologize. His face is likely to be covered with short bristles, a condition which, as he is doubtless aware, teases and annoys. Jed Harris edits and attends to the details of producing plays with a strange, irritable, creative fervor, so that you might think he had written them. Because he has picked four enormous hits out of the mass of plays that go the rounds of the producers' offices, people sometimes ask him for a formula, a hint of how to know. Jed Harris, like every truly successful producer, has no system. Three of his four most famed productions are full of fast action, two are full of profanity, which proves nothing, except that he knows that people like such things in plays.

It would be idle here to list all the theatrical ventures on which Jed Harris's rivals and confreres are at present focusing their furious attention. A few promised productions which are worth expecting:

The Theatre Guild will open its season with Goethe's Faust, directed by Friedrich Holl, follow with a Shaw revival in November and carry through the winter with Meteor by S. N. Behrman and Sil-Vara's Playing at Love. Possibly also the Guild will do a new O'Neill play tentatively entitled Dynamo, Romain Rolland's The Game of Love and Death, Turgenev's A Month in the Country or The Genius and His Brother, by Sil-Vara.

The recent vogue for making Shakespeare modern has extended itself for the coming year to the producers of musical comedy. Like an abdicating heavyweight champion in their homely adoration, George White and others have decided to honor Shakespeare in the only way they know, with naked nymphs and syncopated madrigals. White's notion is a "modern musical version of Romeo and Juliet" but last week, rendered foolish by the astonishing success of his Scandals, he forgot about Shakespeare and said that he was going into the talking movie business. He was tired of soothing temperamental stars.

The Shuberts, too, seem anxious to bring culture to the musical stage. Their first offering is to be White Lilacs, an operetta based on the life of Chopin and accompanied by arrangements of his melodies. It is interesting to observe that Broadway's most potent brothers never seem to get left very far behind. While Harris and White and The Guild, all comparatively new competitors, leap ahead with inspiration, the Shuberts gallop steadily along, always good-natured and always ready to accept the new thing without growls and murmurs. Their faces have none of the melancholy which distinguishes that of A. H. Woods. A Shubert's face is always cheerful, his eyes are bright, his clothes old-fashioned but snappy. The theatre is to the Shuberts a melodious grocery store in which they labor with perfect equanimity, knowing their business well and putting up packages that are tidy though unwrapped. This year the Shuberts plan to produce three operettas, one musical comedy, three musical versions of books, a "spectacular musical extravaganza," musical entertainment, two revues and a play.

George M. Cohan's list this year includes Ring Lardner's frequently re-christened Elmer the Great. Aside from that, it is made up of a musical comedy by himself, and a play for Grant Mitchell and one by and for the Nugents.

Miscellaneously, the year seems promising enough, as do all new seasons when viewed from the solstice. Beatrice Lillie will play in This Year of Grace and the Gershwins will supply songs in a new show for her old playmate Gertrude Lawrence. A play from Floyd Dell's The Unmarried Father will be called The Little Accident. The Private Life of Helen of Troy will at last be made public on the stage. Sam H. Harris, no relative of Jed, will exhibit the Marx Brothers, Harpo (mum), Groucho (chattering), Chico (wop) and Zeppo in Animal Crackers. Arthur Hammerstein plans a "musicalization" of Alice in Wonderland. George C. Tyler will produce Macbeth with Margaret Anglin, Lyn Harding and settings by Gordon Craig. Anne Nichols threatens with Abie's Children and a musical version of Just Married. Florenz Ziegfeld has enticed Ina Claire back into the musical comedy from which she started. Alexander Moissi, late of Reinhardt's troupe, will appear, under the joint management of Edgar Selwyn and Morris Gest, in The Living Corpse.

An event more cheerful than many an opening night will be the closing of The Ladder which has been holding forth so long and so unprofitably on the probabilities of reincarnation. Its now famed producer, Edgar B. Davis, oil-tycoon and philanthropist, last week issued a statement saying that he would withdraw the play since it did not seem to be a success.

So much for the producers. Opposed to the producers, or likely to be, are the dramatic critics and in their ranks, too, there has been an unbuttoning of activity. Most noteworthy is the prospective arrival of St. John* Greer Ervine, famed London litterateur, to do dramatic reviews for the New York World in the space vacated by that jocund but treacherous first-nightee, Alexander Woollcott. Preparatory to the arrival of Critic Ervine, the World inaugurated a scheme which had been formulated to suit his habits and convenience --that of publishing reviews on the second morning after an opening night instead of the first, as has hitherto been conventional.

* In the U. S., anglomaniacs pronounce his first name Sinj'n.