New Plays in Manhattan

Broadway Nights. The Brothers Shubert, playing an infallible system which calls for sprigs of vaudeville and bouquets of decoration, find it profitable to keep at least two musical shows going at once. No sooner had their Pleasure Bound closed than they prepared Broadway Nights to companion their A Night in Venice. If a blindfolded playgoer were ushered into one, then permitted to look, he might easily mistake it for the other.

In the first act of Broadway Nights a group of tinted chorines dance before a mammoth synthetic rosebush. In the second act the celebration is repeated for orchids. The cast is headed by Odette Myrtil, a rough-voiced Parisienne who makes pantherlike glides around the stage while playing cardiac tunes on her violin. This combination of music and motion is popular, but by any comparative standard the name of Laura Lee, the show's small, vivacious song-plugger, should also be featured.

Bogus lectures on anatomy are given by horn-spectacled Dr. Rockwell, who also plays a flageolet. The rest of the comedy has been long hallowed in burlesque halls--the mad bellows and sobs of Harry Welsh as a shouting waiter; the kicks which short, tough Joe Phillips aptly places on female targets.

Freddy is a blinking, fatuous caretaker on the Surrey estate of one Gommery who is busy trying to seduce a London actress. This leaves Mrs. Gommery idle, repressed. She would like to have Caretaker Freddy take care of her. Frightened, as an excuse for leaving, he invents for himself a-mistress in London to whom he must repair. By chance he selects the name of Mr. Gommery's actress. This mock disclosure precipitates an extremely dull, English-accented farce in the P. G. Wodehouse manner but without the Wodehumor. C. Stafford Dickens is playwright and Gommery. Raymond Walburn is Freddy.