New Plays in Manhattan

Burlesque. Last week loud applause came to a young actress who found herself bowing to bravos as featured player of the season's first hit, while her ears still rang with the jazz jingles she crooned only two years ago in the smoky staleness of a night club. Barbara Stanwyck came that suddenly to the apogee of Broadway nights. At first she sang in a cabaret and imitated stage celebrities. Then she had an understudy part in Lily Sue (because Willard Mack* happened to notice her tall, auburn beauty), later a role in The Noose--now her name in white lights. Arthur Hopkins has cast her opposite Hal Skelly, as a slangy lady of the burlesque wheel, who is unfortunately in love with a no-account, shiftless husband (Hal Skelly), a "comic hoofer" without "a laugh above the hips," without timbre to respond to her affection.

Though he shuffles off with a chorine of the Manhattan Follies, she cannot bring herself to marry a princely cattle rancher of the prairies, whose great heart and expansive properties are spread at her feet. She finds herself completely subject to her first, trashy love; follows him through his glimmer of success and his nights of degeneracy, hopelessly, happily enslaved by a pair of stuffed, checked pants.

In the last scene, the audience sees them together as they appear to audiences on the burlesque circuit, doing a waltz buck while a brazen orchestra shatters her sentiment into cheap, broken rhythms. "Can you make it?" she asks under her breath of her tottering spouse, snapped out of a month's debauch for this merry function. "I can--if you'll stick, kid." "I'll stick--always," she answered, and as the curtain falls the audience knows that she belongs forever to the blah of her man, to the hurdy-gurdy of the footlights.

Burlesque is a stunning, crafty show.

Such Is Life. The iron, generally, has been driven into the soul of young playwrights who label their dramas with such matter-of-fact simplicity. In this case, it is a story of four maiden sisters of the heavily-upholstered convention-corseted '90s. Two of them have secretly wed the same rascal. One is recognized as wife; the other bears a bastard son. This black thread in their life's pattern is accompanied by the incessant nagging of the wizened humpbacked sister. In the spinsters' parlor-desert their scandal festers almost to the end. The dreariness of their tragedy is incongruously shattered by Marie Carroll, who, as the worm-eaten, twisted sister, insists upon breaking forth into pert, lovable antics of the ingenue type, known to all stock companies. The audience laughed when it should have commiserated.

* Willard Mack, prolific actor-playwright, last season produced The Noose, Lily Sue, Hangman's House, Honor Be Damned. He himself played in Lily Sue and Honor Be Damned. He has made 1,000 curtain speeches.

/- Arthur Hopkins comes of a family of seven brothers (City Manager William R. Hopkins of Cleveland is one). When he undertakes to present a play, it generally receives every advantage of generous production and intelligent direction. Last year he gave Deep River, the Stallings-Harling opera of native music. With George Manker Watters. he collaborated in writing Burlesque. Probably the common inference that Mr. Watters wrote the play and Mr. Hopkins rewrote it, is correct.