New Plays

The Master of the Inn. In a rather complicate and generally unconvincing contraption the gospel of doing good to others does not impress. The master in point had been disappointed in love and was healing his own wound by taking care of others of the world's unfortunates. The girl he loved and her erratic husband were numbered in this considerable category. He cured them both and returned them to their happiness with no apparent purpose except the proverbially reciprocal reward of virtue.

Robert Loraine, excellent English actor, who 20 odd years ago first played the shows of Bernard Shaw for these United States, was needlessly excellent.

The Greenwich Village Follies.

For seven seasons now this gaudy and often glorious distraction has been placed before you. It has a reputation of excellence exceeded by few of the annual reviews. The current edition, if not the best, was certainly not the worst of the series and will undoubtedly please large portions of the population. It probably has the best looking chorus in town; it has a good many amazingly beautiful assemblies and backgrounds; it has better than average music; and good dancing. It is funny only now and then. The principals are Florence Moore, Frank McIntyre, Tom Howard, Irene Delroy,

Fool's Bells sounded as though it might be something. There were good actors, and A. E. Thomas, who has done successful plays before now, wrote it. It was something. It was something terrible.

The play is an exceedingly sunny charade about a hunchback who did others a great deal of good and finally straightened himself up. The technique is complicated by the fact that the reading of the play takes place within the play. The reader's voice dies, the lights go out and all at once you find actors striding about developing the tale that he has started.

Donald Gallaher (actor who produced The Gorilla) does pretty well and the always dependable Beryl Mercer helps. The chief interest of the opening evening was in the theatre. It is the Criterion, where you have seen The Covered Wagon, The Ten Commandments, etc., returning in its old age to an early and memorable allegiance to the spoken drama.

The Patsy. Barry Conners wrote a play called Applesauce, which Chicago took to its heart and nourished for some 27 weeks. When the entertainment turned to Manhattan that suspicious and exacting metropolis hoisted its nose and said no. The Patsy had a similar background of authorship and Chicago success. The metropolis viewed it tepidly before the opening. Whereupon it turned out to be a decidedly amusing U. S. comedy of love and kindred complications, and Broadway critics were pleasantly and enthusiastically surprised. Perhaps they liked the leading actress best of all. She is Claiborne Foster, a capable young miss more or less given in the past to doing flapper parts in moderate plays. It was she indeed who had the lead in Applesauce in Chicago. Which may account for the success of Mr. Conners' earlier concoction there.

One of the Family. Since It Pays to Advertise and The Tailor Made Man, Grant Mitchell has had lean luck. His undoubted but somewhat restricted talents have not been fitted into a suitable play. This one is about an outsider who married into a Massachusetts household of the aristocratic Adamses. A fair idea but most blunderingly handled.

The Merchant of Venice. Clad in a breath-taking scarlet robe, Miss Ethel Barrymore appeared to Mr. Walter Hampden's Shylock a creation of the role of Portia which flamed like the attack of a young and flighty tanager upon an old and steady-going raven. Mr. Hampden's performance was straightforward, stately and without elocutionary claptrap. Miss Barrymore seemed unusually nervous and selfconscious, but swept the audience off its feet with a blazing scintillant triumph in the trial scene.

There were fewer gondolas and less dancing by the Venetian lagoons, than in the productions sponsored by the late Sir Herbert Tree and E. H. Sothern. The Manhattan babittry did not appear to mind, however, and laughed loudly at the perennial valid gag: "It's a wise son who knows his own father."