New Plays

What Price Glory. Heretofore, war in the theatre has been pretty generally concerned with the girl back home and the band playing the Marseillaise back stage. War has been essentially an adventure into which went certain souls; some of them came out, some were cowards and some were heroes; and the general effect was that of a Liberty Loan fight talk by William Jennings Bryan. What Price Glory is different. It tells the truth.

Twenty marines and one French girl hold the stage. Two scenes behind the lines and one in a cellar at the front define the action. The soldier speech is salted with profanity; the telling of the story seasoned with a stronger irony; the point of the discussion that war is a filthy, futile fever of brutality.

There is little plot. Captain Flagg and Sergt. Quirt have fought in many wars. Always the fighting has been incidental to their personal feud over one girl or another. Quirt is attached to Flagg's company as top sergeant. Five minutes after Flagg departs on leave. Quirt has attached himself to Flagg's French girl. The second act, at the front line, is mainly a war interlude. In the last act, both men--with a chance to have the girl and escape the coming offensive--leave her standing in her dingy little bar.

The extraordinary feature of this amazing play is its persistent wit. It had to be shortened after the opening night because laughter in the audience stretched the evening until 11:30. It is humor close to the soil; sometimes it shocks; always it bites.

The authors (Laurence Stallings and Maxwell Anderson) owe no moderate debt to the cast for a performance that rubs elbows with perfection. Louis Wolheim (Hairy Ape) plays the drunken captain; William Boyd, the sergeant; and Leyla Georgie, a newcomer, the girl. Mr. Wolheim has the toughest face in the American Theatre, the toughest part as Captain Flagg, and he blends them irresistibly. The remainder of the company seems a superb selection. The play with any other cast would smell too sweet.

Percy Hammond--"Mr. Hopkins, the respectable producer, was a little ashamed of the God damns and Jesus Christs in the dialogue, and he apologized in the playbill. . . . Mr. Arthur Krock, who is an editorial companion of the authors on the staff of The New York World, describes their play as a barrack-room ballad. . . .1 thought that Miss Leyla Georgie's characterization of a, frail French girl, skipping gracefully from marine to marine, was a little masterpiece."

Alexander Woollcott--"You may be sure there has been some editing, for the American stage is not yet ready for the undiluted speech of the U. S. Marines. Indeed, the favorite participial utterance of that distinguished corps is not once heard."

Havoc. Two War plays from London are on the list this year, successes both across the Sea. The first is Havoc. The second, The Conquering Hero, which will enter town via the Theatre Guild. Havoc is a front-line melodrama, highly charged with the forces of excitement, toned with tragedy and substantially spattered with romance.

Returning to the trenches, Dick Chapelle brings with him the ring with which Roddy Dunton had affianced Violet Deering. Chapelle has suc ceeded Dunton in her heedlessly wavering affections. They quarrel. In the attack the following day, Dunton gives Chapelle false orders. He returns blinded. Overcome with the vicious cowardice at his act, Dunton shoots himself. Chapelle, sightless, returns to London, to find that the girl has engaged herself to a luxuriously wealthy peer.

Through this cloudy background of tragedy, there penetrate the necessary shafts of laughter. Yet the vigorous values of the play rest in the sting and glitter of its melodrama. As such, it is one of the finest plays that has developed from the War.

The English company from the Haymarket Theatre migrated to Manhattan for the occasion. Joyce Barbour, she of the errant affections, is both beautiful and accomplished in her craft. Leo G. Forbes and Ralph Forbes combine the severity and simplicity of bitter emotion with distinction.

Nerves. Probably when the discerningly competent John Farrar and Stephen Vincent Benet are more experienced in the Theatre, they will look back upon Nerves and wonder why they ever did it. It originated as a one-act War play, was spread thinly through three acts and emerged as such an inexpert contrivance that the critics quite lost their tempers. The story discusses a young aviator with a bad heart and too much imagination who went to War, funked his duty, was driven to it, crippled himself for life getting his Boche. There is also a girl who decided with difficulty between him and the vigorous captain of the squadron. The second act of the play brings the drama of war on the lines into intense, if slightly conventional, relief. The locale of the other acts is on Long Island. College men bandy injudiciously selected slang and punch each other to display affection. Winifred Lenihan gave her usual flawless performance as the heroine, while lesser flights of excellence are provided by Humphrey Bogart and Mary Philips.

Heymood Broun--"Aerial warfare pictured as a sort of Yale Alumni activity."

Top Hole. There is not much to be said about a musical comedy except that it is good or bad. Top Hole happens to be bad.

The Tantrum. Nearly everyone will recall the generously constructed Roberta Arnold of The First Year and Chicken Feed and her voice that twangs like a guitar. She is an anomalously successful actress, having neither beauty, restraint nor reverence for the canons of her craft. Yet she is aggressively effective, recklessly individual. She is Roberta Arnold. You either like her or you do not. Most people do.

She is herein concerned with displaying the vagaries of the modern shrew. The curtain ascends on a man and his wife quarrelling at a theatre. The scene slips away to their comfortable Long Island home where she bickers and batters him into revolt. He deserts to the easier confines of debauchery, finally is shot by the shrew. The scene reverts to the theatre. It has all been a play. The shrew is reduced to tearful penitence and they depart, presumably to a life of humdrum harmony.

Through that first act at home, Miss Arnold resembles a series of explosions caught at the precise moment of detonation. She wastes gestures; she talks at the top of her voice, always out of turn; she overacts magnificently--and makes you like it. Thereafter the play runs down a trifle. There are other good performances, notably Will Deming's difficult drunkard. Yet without Miss Arnold the play would be fustian. With her it seems eventful entertainment.

Percy Hammond--"Expert and amusing."

Alexander Woollcott--"Based on the familiar meditation that, whereas all men kill the thing they love, all women bawl him out."

Be Yourself. It has become a fairly well-established trait of all plays by George S. Kaufman and Marc Connelly to be amusing. The latest is a musical comedy which is short on music and long on comedy. This refreshing departure from the usual is in itself enough to make Be Yourself an encouraging addition to the local ranks. Alexander Woollcott proclaimed it the most comic libretto he had seen in ten years' attendance at the Theatre. The rest of the production is unimpressive. The costumes show lack of taste and the chorus is rather less beautiful than one would wish. Queenie Smith-- she of the brilliant slang and flashing feet--is comfortably situated at the head of the cast.

Rose Marie deserted the beaten track of musical entertainment and emerged from the woods of the opening night equipped with just about everything that lurks in the thickets of novelty. It started out in the first place by combining musical comedy and melodrama. Accordingly, when the music and jokes ran out, it turned on a bit of suspense until the comedian and the tenor caught their breath. It even tried pantomime. It took its locale away from the out worn "house-party-on-Long-Island" set and plunged it into the snows of Northern Canada. It provided a murder and spent the rest of the evening solving it. It employed the brilliant voice of Mary Ellis (ex- Metropolitan) and the sibilant, halting comedy of William Kent. From this curious collection of experiments, it contrived to be one of the best musical shows that has settled itself upon Broadway in months.

Pigs is the family album come to life. The crotchety old country grandma; the overworked mother and father; the languid uncle who will not work; the gossipy, relentlessly pert daughter who has engaged herself to the son of the house, whose great ambition is to become a veterinary: such is the assemblage. To give them excuse for talking through three acts, a drove of ailing pigs is introduced. The son wants to buy the pigs, cure them, sell for a plump profit that will take the mortgage off the house. Eventually he does so. In the meanwhile, there are two hours of pretty consistent amusement--due in no small part to the expert character-playing of Nydia Westman, Wallace Ford, Maud Granger and George Henry Trader.

The Chocolate Dandies. When Shuffle Along burst boisterously on the metropolis a few years back, the wise and the simple tossed their prejudices aside and trampled one another in the effort to get in. It was Negro, it was incredibly swift, it was funny, it was irresistibly musical. It gathered in its train a vast array of imitators of which just one, Runnin' Wild, preserved the tradition. A second offshoot has appeared, fresh off the same family tree and quite in character. In dissecting The Chocolate Dandies, the observer finds the comedy of Sissle and Blake typically comic, the male quartet magnificently melodious, the chorus high in aggregate activity, and the piano playing of Eubie Blake almost an evening's entertainment in itself.

The Haunted House. That strangely combined optimist and cynic, the first-nighter, shook off the lethargy that has consumed him through the mass of inconsequentiality thus far produced this season. He was going to a play by Owen Davis, with Wallace Eddinger in the lead. He relied on the tradition of ably-contrived amusement that these two have reared. He emerged dispirited. The tradition had tumbled.

Since the program pleads with the reviewer not to disclose the solution to the mystery, this department will comply. This department will go farther; it will not discuss the mystery at all. There is no point to a mystery without a solution. It suffices to record that a shot gun, screams, maniacal laughs, a furtive burglar and ghostly faces through the gloom are conglomerated in the interests of laughter. The first act chuckles with encouraging consistency. Thereafter, the amusement thins away.

Wallace Eddinger is invariably amusing as Wallace Eddinger. He reminded one of his glorious performance in Seven Keys to Baldpate. In fact, the whole evening had the ring of the comic mystery which George M. Cohan concocted so adroitly these ten long years ago.

Alexander Woollcott--"Pretty funny, some of it, in spots. Pretty tedious, most of it, in stretches."

The Passing Show of 1924. A vast collection of performers, headed by James Barton, burgeoned forth at the Winter Garden in the best revue of that hardy and decorative series. Lulu McConnell (plump, tough and funny), the Lockfords (intricately acrobatic dancers), Olga Cook (she sings), and Jack Rose (destroys straw hats) were mainly helpful. Barton further proves that he is preeminent on the American stage as a comedian-dancer. There were stunning supplies of costumes and abbreviations that passed for costumes; there was music of masterly flavor; there was a shattering supply of color. But most important of all is the fact that the runway and smoking have been restored to their former glory at the Winter Garden.

The Green Beetle. Critics departed from the opening exercises of this curiously mingled melodrama with varying impressions. Some of them encouraged it with seemingly preposterous praise; others damned it desperately. It all depends upon one's cast of mind. If one is easily susceptible to the winding spell of the Theatre, The Green Beetle will seem a masterpiece of violent suspense. If one is captious and wary of the trade tricks, it will seem inept and valueless.

In a curio shop of San Francisco's Chinatown, Chang Hong plotted revenge on an American who had stolen his sweetheart long ago. Killing the man, he enslaves his wife and seeks to trick the daughter into his web of villainy. He is one of these fearfully wily stage Chinamen who suddenly contract a bad case of stupidity at the critical moment.

Ian Maclaren, Florence Fair and Lee Patrick seem the most advantageously imbedded in the cast. Miss Patrick is most astonishingly beautiful and possessed of favorable talent. She will probably be heard of later as an ingredient in more important fare than The Green Beetle.