New Plays in Manhattan

The Social Register has a title which sounds as if the play might be a searching social document by Channing Pollock. Actually it is a comedy of bad manners, adapted from Anita Loos's But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes. Heroine is a chorus girl who has a heart of gold even though she seldom wears enough tinsel to cover it. She is loved by a rich boy who takes her to meet his family in their palatial home, or what would pass for a palatial home to a Columbia Burlesque audience. It is complete with funny German butler who makes faces behind his employers' backs. His employers are also burlesque characters, a circumstance which may confuse spectators until they remember the amusing cartoons with which the late Ralph Barton illustrated the Loos book. Evidently the actors of The Social Register took a good look at these illustrations while deciding how to interpret their parts. It is scarcely necessary to record that the chorus girl eventually gets her man in spite of his family.

Leading lady of the piece is Lenore Ulric, who has finally come to light comedy after squirming and rasping through a decade of sin for the late David Belasco (Kiki, Lulu Belle, Mima). Her husband, Sidney Blackmer, plays opposite her.

Reunion in Vienna. Having met with but middling success with his second and third plays, Playwright Robert Emmet Sherwood has gone back to the romance-versus-commonsense theme which he used to considerable success in his first work, The Road to Rome. Laid in Alt Wien, this play has to do with the ex-mistress (Lynn Fontanne) of a gaudy, deposed Habsburg (Alfred Lunt, her husband). After the revolution Actress Fontanne had married an eminent psychoanalyst, tried to forget her royal lover. On the 100th anniversary of Emperor Franz Josef's birth, however, a reunion of dowdy royalty takes place at Frau Lucher's hotel, where once nothing was too good for them. Habsburg and ex-mistress attend. In Frau Lucher many a spectator could catch the likeness of eccentric old Anita Sacher, at whose Viennese hostelry defunct Austrian nobility used to be lavishly entertained free of charge to the envy and sometimes inconvenience of more wealthy paying guests.

Actor Lunt, brought face to face with his pre-War inamorata, exerts all his gayety, willfulness, passion in an attempt to gain just one more night with her. He even goes to her house, bringing sophistry to bear on her brainy husband. In defeat, like Hannibal in The Road to Rome, he is victorious.

Louder, Please. So well has Playwright Norman Krasna, onetime office boy for the defunct New York Sunday World, observed the greased-lightning satires of Ring Lardner, George S. Kaufman and Charles MacArthur that none of these practitioners should be ashamed to set their names to Louder, Please. It is a good imitation of the sort of thing that blasted audiences out of their seats several seasons back when Lee Tracy, he of the sunken cheeks, long legs and yellow hair, was romping through Broadway and The Front Page. Happily the services of Actor Tracy have been secured for Louder, Please, a lively dig-in-the-ribs for cinema pressagentry and public relations counseling in general.

It seems that Polly Madison (Jane Buchanan, a lady with a back like Gertrude Lawrence's) is a good actress for Criterion Pictures but is little known outside New York. It is put squarely up to Pressagent White (Mr. Tracy) that Criterion will fire him unless he gets busy and makes Polly Madison America's Sweetheart instanter. The smartest stunt Actor Tracy can think of is to send out his thick-witted photographer to get a motorboat and tow a balloon with POLLY MADISON on it up and down Los Angeles' Long Beach. Hardly has this scheme been launched when a more ambitious plan is brought to Mr. Tracy's attention: why not have Miss Madison lost at sea for a day or so, send the Coast Guard out to look for her, make every front page in the country? Miss Madison, of course, would lie safely low in a cottage in the mountains. Dismissing the thought that he may get ten years in prison if the ruse is discovered, Actor Tracy sets to work on the preliminaries. Raising devout eyes heavenward, he prays: "Oh, God, don't let a war break out tonight. Don't let Congress repeal the 18th Amendment. Don't let Mrs. Hoover divorce nice Mr. Hoover!"

Beginning with Act II, of course, trouble starts breaking fast. As peril creeps nearer, Actor Tracy's mind, mouth, feet and hands work ever faster. Like a mud horse, you have to put Lee Tracy in a tight situation to get the best out of him. He and the stunt come through in fine style at the finale. There is, however, an amusing aftermath. The balloon has lifted the motorboat out of the water, suspending Criterion's photographer in the Los Angeles sky. Someone telephones in offering to bring boat, balloon and unwilling aeronaut down with an airplane for $50. ''Fifty dollars!" complains Mr. Tracy. "You say it's headed for Denver? Well, how high up is it? Can you see the lettering? O.K. Let her sail!"

If Love Were All. The Actor-Managers Inc., who in the past have brewed strong stuff like suppressed Maya, have here turned their attention to "a gentle comedy." It has to do with two families, the Bryces and the Graysons. Mrs. Bryce and Mr. Grayson are lovers. Mr. Bryce is a neurologist. Mrs. Grayson is an invalid. For ten scenes Daughter Bryce (a pretty little Southerner named Margaret Sullavan of last spring's Modern Virgin) and Son Grayson try to be very sophisticated and tolerant about it all, straighten things out. Not until the end do they find out that things have been straightened out all along. The scrambled morality which If Love Were All blithely proclaims is on a par with its construction and dialog.

Sing High, Sing Low opens on a note of brassy burlesque, digresses into old fashioned, fully orchestrated melodrama, and closes with an aria of polite satire played by the woodwinds. In spite of its heterogeneity of mood it manages to be almost continuously amusing. Magnolia Jackson Wainwright (Barbara Willison) arrives in New York from "Jawgia" full of ambition but short of breath. In the limousine of Hugo Winthrop Adams (Ralph Locke) she talks Opera Patron Adams into putting her into an American opera that he is about to present to the American people. Impresario Emilio Amalfi (Giuseppe Sterni) wants the part for an Italian soprano he has concealed in his bedroom. Willie Norworth (Ben Lackland), an assistant press agent, foils Maestro Amalfi's plot, pushes Magnolia on the stage, where she goes through the motions while somebody sings her part from the wings. Maestro Amalfi executes a masterly revenge by talking Magnolia into nonresistance after some wine in his apartment. Next day Magnolia marries the assistant press agent.

Playwrights Murdock Pemberton (The New Yorker art critic) and David Boehm obviously have held the mirror up to the Metropolitan Opera Company. You do not have to know Tristan from Traviata to perceive a similarity between character Winthrop Adams and Banker-Backer Otto Kahn, who recently resigned the Metropolitan's chairmanship (TIME, Nov. 9). Impresario Amalfi might be taken for Manager Gatti-Casazza, the U.S. composer for Deems Taylor. Good interpretation overrides a middling script to make Sing High, Sing Low entertaining.

Brief Moment. As the curtain rises on Brief Moment there is discovered a rotund, elderly gentleman who peeps from fleshy eyes over a little beak of a nose. He is Alexander Woollcott, celebrated Manhattan theatre critic and chit-chatter (World, Vanity Fair, New Yorker) making his debut on the stage in a speaking part. Although written by S. N. Behrman (The Second Man, Meteor) and acted by Francine Larrimore (Chicago, Let Us Be Gay) most of the credit for Brief Moment's entertainment value goes to Actor Woollcott.

It is Actor Woollcott, playing an obese sybarite, to whom most of the other characters tell their troubles. Cast as a sort of glorified Mr. Interlocutor, he learns that Roderick Dean, the banker's son, wants to marry Abby Fane (Miss Larrimore), a night club crooner, because he loves her and because she can supply him with a certain earthiness and self-sufficiency which he lacks. Married to wealth, Crooner Fane takes readily to the drawing room manner, rapidly acquires the very characteristics which her husband wished to shed. They quarrel. She leaves him for an old polo-playing suitor. Ultimately she returns and, spectators are led to believe, everything turns out all right.

First the Theatre Guild got the script of Brief Moment, asked Mr. Woollcott to play the easygoing, quipful part of the helpful intermediary. He refused. Then Katharine Cornell bought it, made the same request. Somewhat puzzled, Mr. Woollcott read the play, soon discovered why his services were in such demand. Playwright Behrman's stage direction for the part was: "He should look like Alex ander Woollcott as much as is physically possible." Showered with congratulatory telegrams and flowers, attired in green silk dressing gown and blue silk pajamas, Actor Woollcott found himself an instantaneous success the morning after the Manhattan premiere. Said he to his Press: "The part I play doesn't need acting. The character has absolutely no emotions. Anyone with a good speaking voice could walk through it. In fact I'll venture to state that any actor living, with the possible exception of Walter Hampden, could play the role as well as I do. ... This year I've done two things I wanted to do -- go to Peking and act in a play. . . .

"I do deserve credit for one thing, however; having the sense to take off my glasses so that I was practically blind and couldn't see a single face in the audience. Otherwise I might very easily have lost my bearings altogether."

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