New Plays

Louie the 14th. Leon Errol's legs straddle this musical comedy like those of the Colossus at Rhodes. Florenz Ziegfeld's latest musical pageant and village carnival has been produced on a scale of towering magnificence. It outshines a Mardi Gras festival and the Follies combined. But unless the book had Mr. Errol's legs to uphold it, it could hardly stand on its own feet.

The tumbling Errol is the principal object of art in some extremely decorative snapshots of musical-comedy France. The comedian seems a bit less springy than formerly, for constant falls have not taken the jar off his spine. But he is as potent as ever in his tipsy dizziness, his skittish gallop. Beneath its bald dome, his elastic face is still fluent with its infantile grimaces.

His role is that of a dawdling cook, left behind in France after the armistice, who is bagged as the 14th guest at a gold-plate dinner of superstitious, rich Americans. He disrupts the party, in accepted operetta vein, with goofy behavior. Eventually he performs a rowdy dance with Ethel Shutta, the latter seeming, in looks and behavior, to be Nora Bayes stretched to the nth degree.

Another Errol specialty vouchsafed is the cluttered, fumbling attempt to gather an armful of packages. Ripe pantomimic art raises this above the level of the five-a-day variety. Mr. Errol's groping hands are beautifully pusillanimous.

The inescapable romantic element centers about Harry Fender, collar advertisement masquerading as a U. S. lieutenant. He loves Doris Patston, French flower-seller with an English accent. She is gracious, with a cool, reassuring voice, nimble limbs, modish good looks. The diligent Sigmund Romberg has drained off another resonant score to match his The Student Prince (TiME, Dec. 15). There is a military chorus to boom close harmony and rumble rifles. Florenz Ziegfeld has window-dressed the scenes far above the usual art-calendar level. The book has been only partially translated from the lumbering German. It would lose momentum but for Errol's hind legs.

Starlight. Nothing is more tempting to most actresses than to vibrate in the role of a celebrated actress, perfumed with a past. Nothing is more likely to bark the temperamental shins. Actresses' lives are admittedly artificial. To paint them up additionally with wire-strung acting is to paint the lily. So, when Doris Keane, in Gladys Unger's play, essayed a role faintly redolent of Bernhardt, she invited the lightning.

The sparks that it struck off were only feeble glints of starlight. From a Montmartre dive in girlhood to stage triumphs, Actress Aurelie Bourgevin (Miss Keane) runs the gamut of 100 emotions, 60 years, 14 costumes, several husbands. Harking back to Romance, she is allowed rapid shifts in mood and attire. Her laryngeal versatility is given scope by screaming in childbirth, yearning in bed and scrubbing her child in its bath tub. Her makeup, modeled after the Divine Sarah's, seems authentic. Sartorially it is striking, but dramatically its fine feathers droop.

At times, it is a rabid effort at the sensational. It gives little real opportunity to Miss Keane, except to show her gifts as a quick-change artist. Amid the lustrous costumes, she is a cake of soap, foaming and floating among its own prismatic bubbles. A large and untiring cast utter the feverishly banal dialog incessantly.

Sky High. This show is like a pair of renovated shoes--its polish is new, its cracks are old. It flashes through a series of pedal acrobatics-farandoles, shuffles, clogs, hornpipes, jigs. Many light-legged ladies agilely provide that atmosphere of deviltry which always overwhelms the very old and the very young at the sight of 20 or more female limbs rapidly manipulated to music. Occasionally William Howard, comedian of the monocle school, advances to the footlights in order to lure back those holders of seats who have begun to make determined, surreptitious exits on all fours up the centre aisle. He imitates Harry Lauder, Al Jolson, Eddie Cantor; he sings, with extraordinary results, a philosophic anthem entitled Let It Rain; he surmises that a talkative lady "must have been vaccinated with a phonograph needle"; when confronted by a man who professes to have sprung from a long line of peers, he says: "And I've leaped from a few docks myself"; when asked if he knows the King's English, he replies that so was the Prince of Wales. There is a Victor Herbert waltz; Dorothy McNulty dances with graceful velocity; Miss Joyce Barbour contributes a patrician presence; Vannessi, the stupidest-looking beautiful woman on the U. S. stage, rolls her eyes.

Michel Auclair. This play, sponsored by the Provincetown group, is a pledge of lost hopes, a souvenir of misshapen direction. The author (Charles Vildrac) is a sort of French Barrie, here perverted into a casual Ibsen. He makes a pretty world for himself out of nice books and brotherly love, ruling out the flesh and the devil. His hero is a young man who is both those Siamese twins of psychology, Dr. Coue and Dr. Frank Crane. The idealist returns from a year in Paris to his village and, finding his fiancee the wretched wife of a doltish sergeant, fulfills his philosophy by helping them to untangle the kinks in their jarring nervous systems.

The cast play it in a shuffling fashion. Edgar Stehli as the idealist, Walter Abel as the sergeant and Helen Freeman as the wife were like mushrooms nodding underground. The slight piece would make a shimmering curtain-raiser, if the cast were whipped up into playing it more smartly.

Pierrot the Prodigal. Not for over a year has the voice of Laurette Taylor been heard on the stage, nor was it heard when, after this long silence, she returned last week to play the title role of this pantomime by Michel Carre, to the music of Andre Wormser. Through three acts which deal with the fragile adventures of poor Pierrot who runs away with one Phrynette, returns home in tears, no player speaks a word. Miss Taylor's face is a painted mask of eternal, baffled laughter, of moon-blanched sorrow; her gestures are eloquent, her insight unfailing. George Copeland, famed pianist, upholds the glittering pattern of gesture with subtle rhythms.