New Plays

Vanities. The second edition of this revue, which threatens to become an annual, went to press with a great deal of shouting; but when the opening audience read the proofs, their reactions were divided. It was agreed that Earl Carroll had crowded a chaotic beauty into his production that would be hard to match but that his search for mirth and music had been less successful. Joe Cook is again the headlined humorist, but somehow his new material does not make up into so effective a garment of gaiety as did his veteran vaudeville sketches. Sophie Tucker heads the parade of pretties. Miss Tucker is not pretty. She is large, loud, good-natured. Saving the costumes, sets and girls, that is about all that can be said for the entire entertainment.

Quinn Martin--"In need of a good joke."

Thoroughbreds. Paternity puzzles in the Theatre are likely to be intricately uninteresting. An absorbing pattern of drama must be sketched to make the spectator care just who is her father. In place of drama, the authors of Thoroughbreds have designed a crazy quilt of odds and ends stitched in from all the parent pieces of this particular ilk.

A youthful lady lawyer of a tiny Southern town is assigned, for her first client, a horse thief. It evolves that the client is her father, and that he has been stealing horses all his life to provide her, anonymously, with a competence. A deep-dyed district attorney ferrets out the facts and offers to absolve the prisoner if the daughter will make the horse thief his father-in-law. Eventually, everybody confesses; and amid a good deal of weeping the hardy hero of the entertainment takes the heroine into his arms and the thief is somehow exonerated.

Ann Harding, the blondest actress in the world, forgot her Southern accent after the opening minutes, and gave a generally mechanical performance which disappointed those who witnessed her brilliant playing in Tarnish last season. George Marion was moderately successful as the soft-spoken kidnapper of horseflesh.

Burns Mantle--"One of those coincidental plays steeped in sentiment."

Gilbert W. Gabriel--"So mortifying is this situation to parent, child and all others concerned that, during the second intermission, a vendor stationed cannily close to the Vanderbilt Theatre's doorway did a rushing business in Birth Control Reviews."

High Stakes. It is more or less generally known that A. H. Woods (bedroom man) had Lowell Sherman on his hands and nothing for him to do. Willard Mack was therefore summoned and directed to fashion a play to Mr. Sherman's talents. High Stakes is the result, and for anyone who knows the type of thing that Mr. Mack and Mr. Sherman depend upon for their existence, the result would almost inevitably be High Stakes.

Lowell Sherman is occupied as a playwright and wit. Since his plays.are not produced, he depends upon his wit. Slashing about him with his wit, he manages to save his elderly and wealthy brother from the designs of a childlike and quite unscrupulous young woman. Lacking a love interest, the dramatist supplied the elder brother with a beautiful stenographer who was portioned off to Mr. Sherman in the due course of these proceedings

The critics were unkind to Mr. Sherman. Mr. Sherman took the opportunity to repay in unkindness their disparagement through curtain speeches during the opening week.* These efforts failed entirely to undermine the position of these critics with their respective editors, and likewise availed not at all toward making Mr. Sherman a good actor. It would take a lot more than curtain speeches to make Mr. Sherman a good actor; and among the first essen- tials would be a better play than High Stakes.

Percy Hammond--"She [Phoebe Foster] and Wilton Lackaye adorned the ribald cemetery of High Stakes with many artistic asphodels. . . . It is a cheap and, no doubt, prosperous entertainment.

The Mask and the Face. Returning voyagers from London reported favorably on this adaptation from the Italian comedy of Luigi Chiarelli. The Frohman Company contracted for Somerset Maugham to do a special version; but another producer slipped ahead of them with the lines as London heard them. William Faversham was summoned to play the lead, and the production was pressed hurriedly into shape. The result was decidedly depressing. The story: A man banished his wife for suspected incontinence, was acquitted of her murder and remarried her (figuratively) at her funeral. The cast, including Mr. Faversham, were received without hosannahs.

Alexander Woollcott--"The most important role of all fell to an actor for whose tricks and manners on the stage we find it increasingly difficult to suppress our complete lack of enthusiasm."

Percy Hammond--"As disheartening an episode as the drama lovers have suffered this season."

Conscience. A new playwright and a new actress combined to furnish the single notable item in the dramatic column of the week. Don Mullally contributed the play and Lillian Foster, trained in Western stock companies, provided her precisive technical ability and brilliant personality. It was Miss Foster's first start in the great Manhattan handicap. Unless signs fail, she will return to win many races.

The play taken all through was not so satisfactory as the actress, but such of it as was good was so good that finer things can be expected of Mr. Mullally. He opens his play in a Yukon cabin, torments his leading man with memories, switches him back to the day when he left his wife alone because it was required of him to go to jail. The wife, driven to the easiest and yet the hardest means of livelihood, was entertaining a visitor when he returned. He murdered her.

Stark Young--"Lillian Foster . . . shades of feeling and grades of reaction she got without a break in the emotional movement."

Alexander Woollcott--"If the first audience did not precisely tear the engine from her taxicab and drag the cab to her hotel, at least it rose and cheered her to the echo."

The Best Plays

These are the plays which, in the light of metropolitan criticism, seem most important:

Comedy

COBRA--A thumping play causing the staring eye and the flushed brow, stirring up considerable expert excitement over the discovery that Eve is still the temptress.

THE MIRACLE--Showing with almost barbaric splendor how the woman paid even as far back as the medieval mystery play.

THE SHOW-OFF--Wherein a ringing and considerably amusing slap is taken at the loud mouth.

FATA MORGANA--The Theatre Guild's comedy by Ernst Vajda in which Emily Stevens does much able acting in the pursuit of one night of love.

SWEENY TODD--An old English melodrama dripping with blood and played seriously to gorgeous burlesque effect.

EXPRESSING WILLIE -- Zoe Akins' deft development of the incompatibility of artistic temperament and the tired business man. The thin spots comfortably padded by a brilliant cast.

THE WEREWOLF--A satirical discussion of incontinence expertly played by Laura Hope Crews, Marion Coakley and Leslie Howard.

Drama

WHITE CARGO -- A severe study in sex and loneliness that has kept an obscure uptown playhouse busy for over 300 nights.

WHAT PRICE GLORY -- A comedy of manners among the U. S. Marines at the front in 1918. The best of the new season

HAVOC--An English War play of moderate distinction made worthy chiefly by an expert cast from London.

CONSCIENCE--Reviewed in this issue.

RAIN--Jeanne Eagels once more in our midst with her diatribe against the South Sea missionary.

Musical

Returning winter colonists are principally interested in the following music and hilarity: Kid Boots, Rose-Marie, The Dream Girl, Chariot's Revue, The Passing Show, I'll Say She Is, The Grand Street Follies, Ziegfeld Follies, George White's Scandals, Stepping Stones.

The New Pictures

The Clean Heart. It is argued by many observers that character study is the highest hurdle between the motion picture producers and the realm of Art. Character may be studied indirectly through incident, and in a small degree through subtlety. Yet without hearing what comes out of a man's mouth it is virtually impossible to tell what is inside of him. In the present picture (from A. S. M. Hutchinson's novel) a character drawing is attempted without alloy. Thanks to the immense sympathetic sincerity which Percy Marmont gives the leading role, the attempt is almost a success.

Mr. Marmont plays a writer whom overwork has steered into a nervous breakdown and mild insanity. Taking up with a philosopher tramp, he narrowly escapes death in an ocean storm, falls in love with the nurse who coaxes back his health. When they are examining the cottage where they expect to live, his mind slips a cog, he calls the girl a common little nobody, whereupon she rushes out to fall over a cliff. The realization of her death crystallizes his love. The girl recovers.

Only slightly less accomplished a piece of acting than Mr. Marmont's was Marguerite de la Motte's in the part of the girl. Otis Harlan as Pud- dlebox, the tramp, made an amiable, Bible-wise drunkard.

The Alaskan. There was considerable agitation among the cinemillions prior to the opening of this film. Thomas Meighan had gone all the way to Alaska to make it. Men, guns and money had accompanied him without stint. It ought to be good. But it isn't.

The story details the efforts of a band of unscrupulous capitalists to steal Alaska from the Pioneers. Dynamite and daggers contribute to the suspense.

Probably the most instantly absorbing feature of the film is the fact that Estelle Taylor plays the girl. Her qualifications include two huge dark eyes.

*He called Mr. Alexander Woollcott of The Sun "a little, round person."