New Plays in Manhattan

Free For All is a tuneful musicomedy presented by smart Producers Schwab & Mandel (Good News, America's Sweet-heart), with a libretto by Oscar Hammerstein II and Laurence Schwab, melodies by Richard A. Whiting. There is no chorus. As a result, the uninterrupted libretto may pall if you think about it too much, but there is good music, a little lively dancing and a dozen pleasant faces.

The story has to do with a group of rich young parlor Communists who want to go to Russia. They do not get there, but the father of one sends them to an abandoned mine in Nevada, where silver is unexpectedly discovered. Most of them then get married and return to the fold of what Messrs. Hammerstein & Schwab would have you know as Good Old Capitalism. One excursion into the office of a psychoanalyst provides merriment.

"What does your husband do?" innocent-eyed Jack Haley asks a lady pa- tient.

"He's a stockbroker."

"Is he a bull or a bear?"

"I don't know."

"Have you any children?"

"Yes, five. We've been married three years."

"He's a bull."

Producers Schwab & Mandel have assembled a notable troupe of beauteous girls for Free For All. Among them: Lilian Bond, whom Oscar's uncle Arthur Hammerstein put in Luana last year before he went bankrupt (TIME, April 6); Vera Marsh of America's Sweetheart; pert Dancer Dorris Groday; Jeanette Loff. late of Hollywood (The King Of Jazz); Dorothy Knapp. a "Most Beautiful Woman In The World" for Earl Carroll and Flor- enz Ziegfeld; lovely Tamara (The Wunder bar).

Tunes to tintinnabulate through early autumn tea dancing: "I Love Him. the Rat," "The Girl Next Door," "Not That I Care."

Just To Remind You, In the theatre, last week was a dire week for the nation's infirmities. First there was Just To Remind You, a sturdy expose of the U. S. laundry racket. Then there was Ladies Of Creation, in which the interior decorating business was delicately satirized (see p. 54). After that came The Man On Stilts, which attempted to skewer the mild insanity which surrounds flagpole sitters, marathon dancers and the like (see p. 54).

Few people are still unaware that in many cities hoodlums extort tribute from laundries. If the tribute is not paid, the laundryman may find his truck smashed, his customers' clothes ruined, his driver's pate cracked. Apparently this unwholesome state of affairs only recently came to the attention of oldtime Playwright Owen Davis. Playwright Davis, 57, does not write mediocre plays. He either writes very good ones or very bad ones. In the latter tradition are such shameless thrillers as Nellie, The Beautiful Cloak Model; Sal, the Circus Girl; Deadwood Dick's

Last Shot. On the other hand, Playwright Davis wrote Icebound, the Pulitzer Prize-winner for 1923.

Playwright Davis, frankly stirred, has written Just To Remind You with the good, solid colors of fiction. There is an honest young man (Paul Kelly of last season's Bad Girl) who sets himself up in the laundry business. Hardly has he hung out his sign before gangsters approach him with demands for "protection" money. Obstinate Mr. Kelly refuses to pay. As a reward for his courage, Mr. Kelly first has his window blown out (Act I); then his customers deprive him of their trade because someone has dumped acid on their clothes (Act II); then (Act III) Mr. Kelly gets shot in the back. As the hero falls to the floor, through an open window the audience can hear fragments of the Gettysburg Address, spoken as part of a crooked judge's July 4 oration, and the Stars-&-Stripes may be seen fluttering from a schoolhouse flagpole. If Playwright Davis's writing had matched his zeal. Just To Remind You would be a more creditable performance. As it stands, the play is hack melodrama. Interviewed with his son and name sake -- for whom he has written the part of a dissolute street Arab -- devoutly said Owen Davis : "I never before wrote a play for any reason other than I thought it would make a good show. But indignation got me. I burned with it. I wanted to say what I could say, in my way, against or ganized crime. I honestly believe that the theatre can arouse public opinion. I honestly believe that the theatre can stir popular indignation. That's what I tried to do." Ladies Of Creation-- In more timid vein than Playwright Owen Davis's Just To Remind You (see above) is this play, a three-act prank about the doings in a wily lady decorator's shop. Chrystal Herne (Craig's Wife, Expressing Willie) is not so spry as she once was but she manages creditably to portray the sort of business woman who blinks, ogles, advances and coyly retreats with an order blank in her hand. Victimized by an Iowa cad, she at last comes to realize that, after all, a girl cannot do everything by herself. She marries her drafting room foreman. At one point, when a charming and moronic movie actress (Dorothy Mackaye) comes to have her sweetheart's penthouse done over, Ladies Of Creation is funny.

The Man On Stilts. Of all things theatrical, satire must be Grade A. The ill which Playwrights Edwin L. & Arthur Barker have set out to pillory is the U. S. hero racket. A young man is pushed headlong to fame after having crossed the continent in a steam roller. When finally the hero rises to say that he is not a hero, the nation simply lifts him a little higher on its shoulders, beatifies him for modesty. All this might have been a good theme had an experienced jiber like George S. Kaufman undertaken it. As it stands, The Man On Stilts is bitter, childish, uninspired, bogus. Evidence of its childishness may be surmised from the names of some of its 35 characters: Ted Sensibull, Englehouse Verbena Coffypopper, Miss Tabloid. Mr. White Sheet, Mr. Pink Sheet, Mr. Yellow Sheet (reporters). Theatre folk wondered why Producer Arthur Hopkins had anything to do with the play.

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