New Plays in Manhattan

The Bride the Sun Shines On. Psyche Marbury and Hubert Burnet were in love with each other but he did not know it until five minutes before she was to be married to someone else. Half an hour after the ceremony they eloped.

Like Peter Arno's Here Goes The Bride, this play is the dramatic venture of a clever satiric artist. Will Cotton (caricatures in Vanity Fair). His play is not so clever, takes a long time to get going, but is pleasantly enough acted by Dorothy Gish and Henry Hull. It is the third production of the New York Repertory Company, the bright theatrical group which revived The Streets of New York two months back.

Of Thee I Sing is the drollest, merriest musical nonsensity to come down the theatrical pike this season. There is good reason for it to be. The book is a product of wry George S. Kaufman (Once in a Lifetime }. The music, which rises at times to the antiphonal absurdity which he first provided for Strike Up the Band, is by gifted George Gershwin. Brother Ira, who with Brother George recently made an excursion into the cinema (see p. 19), has packed the lyrics full of foolishness and funny rhymes. Handsome William Gaxton and Lois Moran of the films, looking but not dancing like Marilyn Miller, carry the burden of the story on cheerful shoulders. And that most despondent of comedians, Victor Moore, is made Vice President of the U. S.

Mr. Moore gets the Vice Presidency as a sort of booby prize when John Wintergreen (Mr. Gaxton) is nominated for the Presidency. Nobody ever pays any attention to Mr. Moore, but Librettist Kaufman has provided some stirring campaign slogans for his running mate: EVEN YOUR DOG LOVES WINTERGREEN; VOTE FOR WINTERGREEN AND THE FULL DINNER JACKET; A VOTE FOR WINTERGREEN IS A VOTE FOR WINTERGREEN. Having no other campaign issue. Mr. Wintergreen hits on Love. An Atlantic City beauty contest is staged, the winner to become Miss White House and the President's wife--if he is elected. As Lyricist Gershwin puts it: // a girl is sexy, She may be Mrs. Prexy. There ensues a good deal of hilarious political satire after President Wintergreen gets to the White House. He is almost impeached, but the Stork outflaps the screaming Eagle. Numbers to try to whistle: "Of Thee I Sing," "Who Cares?", "Love is Sweeping the Country." Sentinels is written by Lula Vollmer, who turned out famed Sun-Up, an earnest play about Southern mountainy folk. No less earnest, no less Southern is Sentinels. But this time Miss Vollmer is writing about quality folk, the Hathaways, and their loyal blackamoors. Mallie raised George Hathaway just the same as she raised her own black Thunder. The honor as well as the persons of the Hathaways is dearer to her than her own life or her own son's. When George kills a blackmailing politician, Mallie turns Thunder over to the mob as the Murderer. Fortunately for Thunder, George does not permit him to make the sacrifice. There are needless complications and rigmarole to the organization of Sentinels, but there is a rousing last line. Says Mallie to her Rebel Mistress as George goes to meet the law: "Dey's bofe my boys and dey bofe went out wif dey haids high!" Acting honors go to Mallie (Negro Laura Bowman) and Ben Smith, as Brother George. Mr. Smith, of Holiday and Brass Ankle, is getting to be a very necessary adjunct to the theatre's Dixie department. Sugar HilL A Negro comedian faces definite limitations. He cannot impersonate a Jew or an Irishman or anybody except a Negro. Thus the humor provided by Negro Musicals is, at its best, like listening to Amos & Andy for the better part of two hours and a half. No exception is Sugar Hill, named after the high-rent district of New York City's dark Harlem. Even the dogged monkeyshines of Flournoy Miller & Aubry Lyles (who shared the success of last decade's Shuffle Along) and a re-enactment of Harlem's recent baby shooting (TIME, Aug. 10)* can not lift Sugar Hill from the limbo of average Negro musicomedy.

*One child was killed, four injured when hoodlum gunners raked a sidewalk in the Italian tenement district, presumably to kill an enemy. On trial for the crime, Gangster Vincent Coll was acquitted when, last week, the testimony of the State's star witness collapsed.

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