New Plays
The Carolinian. Sidney Blackmer is a star whose radiance many people have been unable to appreciate. For the past few seasons he has been attempting gorgeously romantic parts and having rather ill success. This play is a melodrama of the American Revolution by Rafael Sabatini. Again Mr. Blackmer seems particularly badly suited to his role.
The hero is a dashing dog than whom no one in Charleston can fight or love more fiercely. He is in charge of the rebel forces and becomes deeply implicated in a treason plot through his pretty wife's Tory family. In a last act, which is as complicated as a mystery melodrama, the true spy turns up and the British are confounded.
The play is not particularly good. Handicapped by its star, it makes mediocre entertainment. Mr. Blackmer makes the dent a pillow might if fired from a cannon instead of solid shot. The presence of Martha Bryan Allen, loveliest of our younger actresses, is a vast pictorial advantage.
Laff That Off. Chicago enjoyed this entertainment moderately for some weeks before its Manhattan opening. On that latter occasion the votes were generally unfavorable. The plot brings the inevitable small town girl to New York, pictures her struggles and her adoption by three bachelors.^ Later she bursts forth as a movie star and marries her rescuer bachelor. The company is only mildly talented.
Florida Girl. Earl Carroll, who usually contents himself with Vanities, turned with this piece to musical comedy. He made Lester Allen a leading comedian in the process and amused the initial gathering moderately.
Mr. Allen is a comic who helped a lot in several Scandals and other musical pieces. He is a detective in this one, forced to discover smuggled diamonds before midnight. The process of the discovery is utterly illogical--there-fore completely and amusingly suited to musical comedy.
Vivienne Segal sings most of the songs, recalling for many the pleasant afternoons and evenings when she was in Oh Lady, Lady. Ritz Brothers, three of them, vaudeville favorites, add absurdities.
Young Woodley. The return of Glenn Hunter after his long and brilliant occupation in Merton of the Movies is one of the important autumn happenings. He fulfilled in a different and far more serious part the expectations of his followers. He plays a school boy of England and makes the character live and suffer notably.
The subject of puppy love is usually smothered in laughter. The acuteness of youthful suffering is dismissed by the world because the suffering is temporary. Youth forgets its love affairs, but the fire burns deep. Perhaps in its very intensity it burns itself out. Young Woodley, written by John Van Druten (an English schoolmaster), depicts the time when the blaze is fiercest. Young Woodley has fallen in love with the pretty wife of his mathematics tutor.
On the opening evening the audience was obviously bewildered. It seemed to expect that at any moment the play would suddenly become Seventeen with an English accent. Such development did not take place, but the audience laughed at the wrong time just the same. Scarcely in the memory of the staunchest theatregoer has there been such a flagrant example of ill manners and incomprehensible stupidity on the part of men and women who marry and go through the other forms of presumably intelligent adulthood.
Adam Solitaire. The Provincetown Theatre has long been the cradle of experiment. It is quite true that few of its occupants have ever grown up to the full stature of success--in fact a great many of them have died within the month. Yet The Emperor Jones and others of O'Neill's are of the family, and for their sake the faithful watch each new performance eagerly for the appearance of an important pioneer. Em Jo Basshe,* author of Adam Solitaire, does not seem particularly important. He has written, in the manner of the German expressionists, about superstition and the effect of the ill counsel of our elders. He has conceived one magnificent stage effect in a falling bridge. On the whole his play seems a rather faint echo of George Kaiser's From Morn to Midnight.
Princess Flavia. Each year the Brothers Shubert dig down into the vaults of their experience and produce something more vast and more exciting than before. The Student Prince and The Love Song were their great operettas last season. Princess Flavia is certainly bigger, and some say better, than ever, with immoderate supplies of beautiful scenery, seemingly hundreds of performers, good music and good voices. Jokes are virtually omitted. There is a considerable public for this ambitious type of entertainment. Princess Flavia should more than satisfy.
The story is taken from the ever reliable Prisoner of Zenda. Harry Welchman is imported from England to sing the dual role of Rassendyl and the King, and makes a personable and exceedingly capable performer. Evelyn Herbert, former grand opera girl, is equally able as his Princess.
The Best Plays
These are the plays which, in the light of metropolitan criticism, seem most important:
SERIOUS
OUTSIDE LOOKING IN--A tale of tramps and how they helped a jaunty little murderess across the border.
THE GREEN HAT--Michael Arlen's gilded gentry and his tarnished temptress, whom the public worship.
CRAIG'S WIFE--A lady who lived like a snail and whose beautiful house was the greatest burden of her heart and mind.
YOUNG WOODLEY--Reviewed in this issue.
A MAN'S MAN--A tale of eagerness and ignorance in a cheap Manhattan flat.
THE GLASS SLIPPER--June Walker giving a glorious performance as the little Budapest slavey who fell in love with the star boarder.
THEY KNEW WHAT THEY WANT-ED--Sunshine and sorrow, and a San Francisco waitress arriving to marry an Italian grape rancher whom she has never seen.
LESS SERIOUS
CANDIDA--Back to town for a few weeks. Peggy. Wood playing the title part in one of Shaw's greatest.
THE VORTEX--An English story of limp morals in a second-rate family. Noel Coward acting in his best play.
ARMS AND THE MAN--Mr. Shaw's early war satire revived magnificently by Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne.
Is ZAT So?--A staccato comedy of prizefighters, kitchen maids, millionaires.
THE BUTTER AND EGG MAN--A brilliant and irresistible satire on the strange ways of the theatre and its peculiar backstage population.
MUSICAL
If you prefer your amusement set to music, the following are recommended: Sunny, Rose-Marie, The Vagabond King, Big Boy, The Student Prince, Artists and Models, Princess Flavia, Louie the 14th and No, No, Nanette.
* Real name: Emmanuel Joseph Basshe,