New Plays in Manhattan

Calling All Stars (words & music by Lew Brown & Harry Akst; Lew Brown, producer). There are at present three other musical shows in Manhattan.* As a group, they are above-the-average entertainment. Some have better scenery, better dances, better lyrics than Calling All Stars. But Producer Brown's show need yield nothing in such notable moments as these:

Phil Baker, the apotheosis of Broadway sophistication, in his old routine of being heckled from a box. In the box this time is loud Lou Holtz, the most ribald and impertinent comedian in the business.

Holtz: Say, I was in show business. I was a Shakespearean actor.

Baker: Well, tell me, in the play Hamlet, was Hamlet having an affair with Ophelia?

Holtz: He was, in the company I was in!

Pink-haired, ingratiating Jack Whiting running a musical temperature with a little doll-faced girl named Ella Logan and a long-locked blues-singer named Martha Ray in a number called "If It's Love."

"The Last of the Hill-Billies," a skit by H. I. Phillips, New York Sun columnist, showing a cabin full of mountaineers taking potshots at agents, theatrical, not revenue, who have come to kidnap the last of the mountain musicians for the radio and stage.

A spectacularly charming number in red-white-&-blue for the tune, "I Don't Want to be President (if it means my losing you)."

Little Dancer Mitzi Mayfair, in blue spangled pajamas, making her legs fly around like pin-wheels.

Messrs. Holtz & Baker, in boots, dilapidated hats and hickory shirts, courting Judy Canova, a dry, hillbilly Beatrice Lillie, with a spurious mountain ballad:

"We'll run a footrace to see who wins.

We'll run a footrace to see who wins.

O' we'll run a footrace to see who wins

And the one who loses gets you."

Best tunes: "I'd Like to Dunk You in My Coffee," "I Don't Want to be President," "If It's Love."

Sailors of Cattaro (by Friedrich Wolf; Theatre Union, producer). In January 1918, a section of the Austrian Imperial Fleet cowered in the Adriatic's Bay of Cattaro. Superior British warships had knocked the Austrian seamen groggy every time they ventured out to fight in their decrepit craft. Bad food, bad news, bad treatment had utterly demoralized the sailors at Cattaro. Encouraged by food riots and strikes by the War-weary proletariat ashore, the seamen mutinied. Playwright Wolf, a German Communist whom Adolf Hitler chased into Russia, has built a strapping propagandist melodrama out of the Cattaro incident. And, like the best dramatic works now being presented in the U. S. S. R., Sailors of Cattaro disguises its bias and adds to its interest with some penetrating Communist self-criticism.

The cruiser Saint George was one of the last ships to join the insurrection. Bosun Franz Rasch (Tom Powers) of the Saint George is one of its most active ringleaders. At the appointed hour he seizes the ship's officers in the chart room, orders the Red flag hoisted. After that decisive action the mutiny goes steadily to pot. Clumsy forecastle parliaments are set up, and instead of executing a quick dash up the coast to Pola, where another squadron is seething with revolution, the seamen bicker about whether men over 40 with three children shall be mustered out before men over 40 with two children. One heart-breaking blunder follows another. When Rasch pleads for action, the majority of his fellow seamen sarcastically call him "Commandant" Rasch. Hence forth, they remind him, decisions are to be made not by individuals, but by mass ballot.

A mass ballot by the sailors of Cattaro votes Rasch out of power. Down steams the Pola squadron, manned by picked and loyal crews. Up goes the Imperial eagle on the Saint George's masthead. Down falls Rasch with three others before a firing squad. Furtively, three who betrayed Rasch pick up their Red emblem from the deck, simper: "Next time, comrades, next time. . . ."

Moskowitz on Sobriety

Dr. Henry Moskowitz is a Manhattan physician. He was also the husband of the late Belle Israels Moskowitz, famed aide and adviser to Alfred Emanuel Smith. He is also executive adviser to the New York League of Theatres. At a luncheon of the Broadway Cheese Club last week, Dr. Moskowitz said:

"A critic who comes to a show half-soused cannot do justice to that play, and press agents and managers are justified in insisting upon sobriety as a requisite for critical function."

*Life. Begins at 8:40, Say When, Anything Goes.

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