First Nights

The Love Habit. This is an immigrant farce from Paris which has escaped the moral rigors of Americanization. In the course of it the stupid husband loses a mistress while his more intelligent spouse gains a lover.

Finding out about the somewhat commercialized romance between Gustave Morand and Rosette Pompon, ex-dancer, the young man who has been vainly assaulting Gustave's wife's marital stability pretends to be Rosette's ex-dancing partner. By dint of robust blackmail, he persuades the perturbed husband to take him into his home as secretary, thus facilitating his campaign. The resultant complications are judiciously distributed through two acts.

His pursuit take him on a wild goose chase to Toulouse, while his quarry hides in Versailles and the husband is excursioning with Rosette. Meanwhile the real ex-dancing partner drops in and extorts bills of varying denominations from everybody concerned. Rosette throws over Gustave in favor of a higher bidder, business being business, and Gustave confesses to his wife, thus disarming the young man.

Unforunately the wife, touched by the fact that her would-be seducer had refused to use his knowledge of her husband's defection as a means of getting her to rebound into his embrace, begins to fall in with his view of the situation. She dutifully forbids him access to her house, but only after the preliminary precaution of ascertaining his address. The curtain thereupon falls, and the houselights reveal the hot flush of embarrassment on the faces of the audience.

Among the more interesting characters involved are Rosette's two great danes, whom the spectator hears a lot about but never meets.

Hey wood Broun: ". . . abounds in good, clean fun and also in good fun."

Alan Dale: ". . . slothful return to the old-fashioned formula."

Alexander Woollcott: " Breezy, saucy and entertaining."

The Comedian. Lionel Atwill is confronted with the problem of aging gracefully in a few minutes. He appears as a distinguished actor whose mail is freighted with scented trifles. Among the young hearts fluttered by his brown wig and moustache is the adolescent ward of an old schoolmate of his. The latter, a rotund provincial, conceives a plan to break her of her attachment. Let her, thinks he, but see her idol as he is, gray-haired and middleaged, and she will march out of the dressing-room in disgust.

Unfortunately, the comedian finds the plan disconcerting to his selfesteem. So he meets her in make-up and removes it by imperceptible touches, casting about her the while the spell of his personality, so that when he is himself again the whole process has gone unobserved and she is his for the plucking. He plucks.

As a wife, the little lady develops one unfortunate propensity. She insists on being his leading lady. In rehearsal she seems all right. On the opening night she thinks she is all right. So that when her husband conscientiously explains to her that she not only was not good, but was absurd, her pride suffers a fall. Her comeback, however, is immediate. She gives him a devil and deep-sea to choose between. Either she continues to act or she leaves him.

Driven to decide between his heart and his public, he finds the call of art louder than that of affection. She goes and he devotes the rest of the act to acute misery. " But tomorrow night," he exclaims, " I have a rendezvous with 1,200 people!"

Kenneth Macgowan:". . . effective, popular entertainment."

Alexander Woollcott: "... a little mechanical and labored and untrue."

Alan Dale: ". . . redolent of the coulisses."