Sorceress Meller
These are the plays which, in the light of metropolitan criticism, seem most important.
SERIOUS
CRAIG'S WIFE -- A sharply etched portrait of a woman whose house became a shrine and not a home.
THE DYBBUK -- Jewish legend and mysticism in a brilliantly executed production at the tiny Neighborhood Playhouse.
BRIDE OF THE LAMB -- Alice Brady in a stirring, shocking play about the mixture of religion and sex.
YOUNG WOODLEY -- Glenn Hunter and an adept troupe discussing an English schoolboy's earliest love affair.
LULU BELLE -- Merimee's Carmen done over for a Harlem Negro courtesan. Principally Lenore Ulric.
WHITE CARGO-- The old favorite, White Men melting morally under the African sun, returning for a spring engagement.
THE GREAT GOD BROWN -- Eugene O'Neill's strange mingling of brilliance and obscurity in a play about a man who borrowed another's brains.
CYRANO DE BERGERAC -- Walter Hampden's excellent revival of the French classic about a lover with a big nose.
LESS SERIOUS
THE LAST OF MRS. CHEYNEY -- Ina Claire and her English assistants still entertaining agreeably in the genial history of stolen pearls.
WHAT EVERY WOMAN KNOWS-- Reviewed in this issue.
CRADLE SNATCHERS--A bawdy tale of old women and young men, which seems to amuse almost everybody.
MUSICAL
Tired business women and big butter and egg men generally go to these: The Vagabond King, Sunny, The Cocoanuts, The Student Prince, Pinafore, Tip-Toes, Artists and Models, By the Way and No, No, Nanette.
Sorceress Meller
Her Hands Are Like Faces
A Manhattan theatreful of the East's leading fad-connoisseurs fell into expensive hush, breathlessly hoping that all they had heard from Americanos lately abroad was even partly true. Glad tidings had come from widest sources; from jaded novelists and strong-minded grandmothers, from callow collegians and a onetime U. S. foreign ambassador, who had circulated verses that were but feebly expressive of the ecstasy that called them forth. The evening had even been signalized by a cable from the King of Spain--his thanks in advance for America's "homage to Spanish art."
Ushers with tall combs and white mantillas stole back up the aisles as the house lights faded out. The orchestra blared some opening bars, then hushed to a faintly drumming vamp. Into a pool of amber light on the empty stage, stepped a small woman with hair of jet, a stocky little figure in velvet flounces, with a broad, flat face of extraordinary mobility. Her black eyes grew slowly wider and deeper as a spattering storm of applause burst upon her, swelled and rumbled with calls of "Brava! Brava!" which took five minutes to blow over.
When she could make herself heard, Raquel Meller began her U. S. career with a simple Spanish folksong, a song which might be the distant Castilian cousin of "Old Black Joe." It was so simple, so undemonstrative, that the connoisseurs after listening intently were conservative in their applause. The lights went up and they rustled their programs to find the condensed translation of the next song. The lights went down, Meller sang; again the applause was careful, a bit puzzled. From 9:15 to 10.45 it continued--songs of love, toreadors, religion, clothes--with one long intermission in which the bespangled audience--Anita Loos and Father Duffy, Al Jolson and His Honor the Mayor, and many another more or less notable who had paid $27.50 to be there-- crowded out into the lobby to ogle one another.
But, at about 10:30, something happened. For the next-to-last of her baker's dozen of songs, Meller chose "Flor del Mal" (Flower of Sin). It tells, with the utter simplicity of all Meller's repertoire, the hopeless, disdainful story of a street girl. Her clothes were shoddy, ill-fitting; her hair slovenly, black about her forehead. Midway in the singing Meller moved out on a little platform almost over the heads of the first row, and lighted a cigaret. She smoked it singing and walked over to lean, dejected, against the stage wall. The song ended and she disappeared.
By now the applause was no longer conservative. The charm of an irresistible personality, smoldering through the evening, never revealing more than a flicker of its hidden fire, had burned home its deep impression. When she sang her most famous piece, "Violetera," where she goes among the audience with little violet bunches to offer musingly, withdraw capriciously, bestow impetuously, the starched and bejeweled Manhattanites arose and cheered. Her acknowledgment was--a quiet curtsy. More cheers. She sang an encore. The final "Brava!" The audience went home to talk it over, a new fad that promises to last weeks after Meller's departure.
It cannot be said that they were swept away utterly by the strange, quiet Spanish singer. Her art was too subtle to sway a shrewd U. S. audience that had paid $27.50* a seat to be amused. It had been a great occasion in the theatre; one of the few supreme personalities of entertainment had fulfilled her promise, and Meller, who carries eight golden bracelets as mementos of her great successes, was fully entitled to purchase a ninth golden bangle. Yet the barrier of language and the unfamiliarity of a charm that has fathomless depths but no tumult had obtruded themselves. The audience had been appreciative, engrossed, deeply stirred; but they did not drag her coach home to the hotel.
Critics said:
"A fine actress, a rare artist of the kind that comes but once in a generation, a bit of a sorceress, if you ask me."--Alexander Woollcott.
"Her art is an exotic radiance, less than music, less than great acting, but more than these put together."--J. Brooks Atkinson.
"An amiable sorceress, dark, inscrutable, good to look upon and exercising the benign witchcraft of a fascinating and highly advertised woman."--Percy Hammond. "The hands are like faces."-- Arthur Hopkins.
Temperamentally offended by personal publicity, Raquel Meller has been the inspiration for much befuddled biography. It is, however, generally agreed that she was born in Saragossa, in Aragon, Spain, between 30 and 40 years ago. Some say that her parents were performers. She was taught to sew--at which art she went nearly blind once--and to sing Vespers in a convent, from which she escaped with the help of the gardener's ladder.
She was a young girl when she took her first engagement in a dingy Barcelona fishermen's cafe. She wandered from village to village, city to city, picking up the melodies that are woven through Spanish life. Her King heard of her and commanded a performance. She became the cardinal vocal artist of her country.
Six years ago she sang in Paris, later in London, Rome, South America. For more than three years, impresarios have been trying to lure her to the U.S. Broken contracts, excuses about fear of the sea, homesickness, personal ties intruded, and not until E. Ray Goetz, husband of Irene Bordoni, persuaded her, would she set sail-- she and her three maids, eight dogs and 42 trunks in an entourage reminiscent of Sarah Bernhardt, who once heard her sing in private and told her she would some day be "as great as I think I am."
After four performances a week for four weeks (at $6,000 a performance) in Manhattan, she will visit, for a week each, Philadelphia, Boston, Washington, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco. Once on the coast, she will probably make a cinema.
Meller has been married. Gomez Carillo, her husband, was a powerful South American journalist. Jealous of her success, he had her arrested and almost succeeded in having her detained in an asylum for alleged insanity. The Pope annulled their marriage. She pronounces her name May-aire, but Manhattanites say Meller.
New Plays
What Every Woman Knows. In the unfortunate scarcity of new plays by J. M. Barrie, the next best thing is a revival. We have not had a Barrie play since Mary Rose, and nobody seems to know at all when he will finish his next one. Nearly every Barrie revival runs the danger of being submerged by the lovable phantom of Maude Adams. This production was originally scheduled for Laurette Taylor and Godfrey Tearle, and was to be followed by The Admirable Crichton. It was offered to Grace George, who with remarkable insight suggested that the play would be most interesting if done by one of the new generation. Helen Hayes was consequently selected for the part, and probably made the greatest impression of her relatively brief career.
Barrie's Maggie in the play is supposed to be a woman without charm. The part must then be played by a woman of such infinite charm that she can triumph over unattractive dresses and other consequential detriments to the average woman's triumph. This Miss Hayes has done, and by so doing releases herself definitely from the (for her) ever present danger of being our brightest and best stage flapper.
The Bells. In this season of recurrent revivals, almost any student of the older theatre could have foretold that this veteran success of Henry Irving's would be dragged out and done again. This same student might also have foretold the futility of the attempt. The Bells is an old melodrama of Alsace, in which the Burgomaster had murdered a wandering seed merchant 15 years before. Any doubt in this matter is completely cleared up when the Burgomaster stops the second act for about five minutes to reconstruct the crime in soliloquy. Rollo Lloyd played the part and did well in the face of its ancient and insurmountable difficulties.
Love in a Mist. High comedy is nebulous stuff and demands much of the playwrights and performers. It received everything from the latter in this production and virtually nothing from the former. It reveals a girl who simply could not tell the truth and who got herself, a southern youth, and an Italian nobleman into no end of difficulty through this inability. Madge Kennedy, Sidney Blackmer (giving his best performance in several seasons) and Tom Powers are occupied as these three. Even so, the manuscript is wandering and almost mirthless.
Cherry Pie. A pocket-sized revue was put on at the pocket-sized Cherry Lane Theatre in Greenwich Village and proved dull. It was one of the various little musical shows which spring up as summer approaches, in the hope of emulating the success of the Grand Street Follies and the Garrick Gaieties. One or two of the players, all unblessed by previous prominence, were markedly adept; one or two of the sketches were smart.
*Subsequent performances cost $11.