New Plays in Manhattan

Fast Life. Better had this piece been called Slow Death. It is another from fecund Playsmith Samuel Shipman. The male party to a companionate marriage is accused of murdering a friend. It turned out that the real murderer was the son of the Governor, but this development was not permitted to have any effect until the unjustly accused was seated in the electric chair, a hood over his head.

By Request. Bill Abbott (Elliott Nugent) is a tanktown newsman summering in Manhattan for business reasons. Claudia Wynn (Verree Teasdale), a blandishing literary agent, wants to cut capers with him at Bar Harbor. Just then Mrs. Abbott (Norma Lee) comes bringing her fetching naivete from the plains and salvages her husband in two acts of dubious psychology. But if the psychology is brittle, Mr. Nugent's comic gaucherie is quite successful. He elicits considerable amusement despite a trite plot and an uneven script. Furthermore, Miss Teasdale is as lush a blonde as one is likely to see this early in the season. Father (J. C.) and son (Elliott) Nugent wrote the play. Father, son and son's wife (Norma Lee) all appeared in it.

Chee-Chee. Such is the babyish title of an Eastern and elaborate musical comedy whose plot depends, not upon romance and cotton-wool, but upon the hero's efforts to avoid castration. The hero is the son, born in early wedlock, of the Grand Eunuch. Not wishing to be his father's successor, he flees the royal city in company with his wife, Chee-Chee. On the road, they are beset by Tartars, monks and brigands who beat the hero and take Chee-Chee off-stage for purposes which can be guessed. Finally the Grand Eunuch catches up with his son and prepares to have him fitted for high office; but a friend of Chee-Chee, Li-Li-Wee, persuades her husband to kidnap and impersonate the surgeon. Li-Li-Wee's husband then plays dominoes with the son of the Grand Eunuch instead of operating on him; thus providing the most extraordinary happy-ending which has yet been permitted on the Manhattan stage.

It must be admitted that Chee-Chee, though sometimes cute and always dirty, is not consistently amusing. Herbert Fields deduced the book from Charles Petit's novel. Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart managed to engender "Better Be Good to Me" and "I Must Love You," but they were neither lyrically nor musically up to standards of their Garrick Gaieties or A Connecticut Yankee. Helen Ford as Chee-Chee and Betty Starbuck as Li-Li-Wee were respectively arch and charming. George Hassell squealed and grunted in cagey fashion as the Grand Eunuch. Chee-Chee would be funnier if it did not so faithfully preserve its "you're mine and I love you" attitude toward the slimy joke of compulsory castration. The critics were shocked, and the decent public, eager doubtless to see the sumptuous settings, crawled, in surreptitious droves, to see Chee-Chee.

Elmer the Great. Elmer Kane didn't quite know what it was all about but that was something which he refused to admit to himself or anyone else. His girl didn't seem to think he was so hot; all Elmer knew how to do well was to pitch ball, so he took the contract that was offered to him and went south to training camp with the "New Yorks." His teammates kidded him because they thought he was fresh; Elmer, puzzled and proud, started to leave the club. But the boys knew that Elmer wanted to make a speech over the radio so they handed him an electric heater and told him to go ahead and to say something nice to Coolidge who was listening in. That made it all right with Elmer.

During the course of the season, he won 27 and lost three. After the world series he clicked with his girl and took in about $100,000 worth of contracts for endorsements and got a $30,000 contract with the "New Yorks" and took to eating the kind of breakfasts he really liked, nine-course breakfasts. Still, he didn't quite know what it was all about.

That is the story of Elmer Kane in its essentials; it is also the story of Jack Keefe, the hero of Ring Lardner's You Know Me, Al. Somehow Ring Lardner has been able to put Jack Keefe, himself in person, onto the stage, and Walter Huston plays the part so that you forget it is one. George M. Cohan produced the play and Cohan plays have plots; therefore you will find, muffling the funny and pathetic character of "Hurry" Kane, a ridiculous jumble about an attempted Black Sox deal which is very nearly sufficient to spoil the play entirely.

The War Song. Theatre-goers well know that the post-War reconstruction period has not ended though a decade's years have intervened since Nov. 11, 1918. Critics & others, sated with many a propagandrama for or against hostilities, frequently have wished for a pact to outlaw war as an instrument of national amusement policy. But let no critic ban war or dressmaking or boxing or any other subject as a playground if playsmiths can use war, dressmaking or boxing to a worthy end, as in this piece.

The first scene is in the Manhattan home of the Rosens in September, 1917. Eddie Rosen (George Jessel) does not want to go to war because he does not want the burden of supporting his mother (Clara Langsner) to fall to his sister (Shirley Booth). He is drafted, sent to France. In a Y. M. C. A. hut he meets his onetime sweetheart (Lola Lane), learns she has married Eddie's onetime pal and fellow song-plugger (Raymond Guion), both of whom are singing and dancing for the delectation of the troops. From that point the story fizzles into a sequence of capture by the Germans when Eddie meets in a shell-hole an officer who had seduced his sister. Behind the German lines Eddie learns from the officer that his mother has died and the piece ends with Eddie lachrymosely chanting the Kaddish, Jewish prayer for the dead.

That is what may seem a terrible play, sight unseen, but each role has been given to a thorough player. The sets by Yellenti include one of a scene in No Man's Land which must give an authentic impression of that hell to one who has never been there. Upon the square shoulders of George Jessel has been placed the task of carrying off the play's heavier moments--a task to which he is more than equal.

Careful program-perusers noted (among the credits for Mr. Jessel's clothes, etc.) this thank-you: "Soldiers in the second act, veterans of A. E. F., supplied through courtesy of U. S. Veterans' Bureau."

Jarnegan. To Hollywood, the "bums' paradise," where there is "a pushover on every corner," comes Jack Jarnegan, a crude and noisy dynamo, full of boxcar bombast. Soon he is a director of cinemasterpieces. He confesses that on his arrival in the loud metropolis he slept in a flop house in company with other tramps; now, on the contrary, he has a fine house where there are eleven bedrooms and a Jane in every one. Richard Bennett plays Jarnegan with guttural roars, hob-nails, stubble-beard and a chest expansion. All this is profane and exciting.

Jarnegan is successful with the loose ladies of Los Angeles but there is one, a demure 16-year-old with "something in her eyes," whom he wished only to make into a star. When she dies of the effects of an operation, Jarnegan grows furious. He visits the mansion where an executive is giving a party; here, he states convincingly that the executive is a murderer, that the mother of a celebrity runs "a two-dollar house in Seattle"; then he shakes the rival director who has defiled the 16-year-old star. This is also profane and exciting.

Jarnegan is then a profane and exciting melodrama, though one which retains, despite the severe directorial auspices of George Abbott, many touches of Jim Tully's soapy sentimentality. Richard Bennett does most of the acting; Joan Bennett, his daughter and the sister of famed Constance Bennett, is beautiful and well cast as the 16-year-old unfortunate. The truest thing in Jarnegan is the performance, provided by Wynne Gibson, of a dipsomaniac star arriving at the peak of her intoxication; hearing noises in the night, she surmises that the owls are after her; with puzzled insolence she abuses an extra girl and wraps herself wildly in a black lace shawl.