New Plays in Manhattan

The Queen's Husband. As diarist of an unidentified king, discovered last week acting oddly upon the stage of a Manhattan theatre, Robert Emmet Sherwood develops ramifications. He sets up a satire on royalty, gilds it with hot romance and stripes the second act with melodrama. One hears an undertone of Bolshevism and unmistakable echoes of the derision that dogged Queen Marie across our country. Mr. Sherwood dares destroy any trace of consistency by marrying off his Princess to her plumber's son at the end with as glossy a happy ending as ever was pasted on the movies which Mr. Sherwood criticizes so capably when he is not editing Life or commenting on music for The New Yorker. Or writing plays.*

Roland Young was selected with un canny precision for this curiously agree able king. He plays with such gentle cun ning that the evening swishes suavely past like a cat in silk pajamas. There are several shrewd helpers and an excellent back stage device to counterfeit the rattles of artillery deploying before the palace in the embattled second act. Mr. Sherwood has contributed much high nonsense, nota bly a bitter game of checkers between the King and a gravely obese footman.

So Am I. A devout but too-refined lady infected with medievalism is married to a rich banker. Finding in his library a copy of Boccaccio's stories made doubly suggestive by "piquant illustrations," she reads them greedily. This, as first act rhetoric has drilled the audience to expect, produces a potent effect on the cool bride; she becomes coy, passionate, kittenish. The dialogue is a rigid translation from the Italian; like the direction and the acting, it is excessively clumsy.

The Mystery Man. The plight of a slightly intoxicated clubman who came home one happy evening and found a dead man on his couch is herewith hammered home. A large cast is rushed upon the stage and accused with varying degrees of inaccuracy of the shooting. These inaccuracies make it a mystery play. It is unre-sourceful entertainment.

We Never Learn. The life of a lawyer is hard, particularly when he commits murder and is called upon to defend the victim inaccurately accused of the same homicide. This lawyer had murdered a lover of his own mistress. The whole matter was naturally distressing to his wife and little ones at home. Likewise to the audience, which was not amused.

Best Plays in Manhattan

SERIOUS

COQUETTE--Helen Hayes helps the audience to a good cry as the southern belle whose heart cracked for a murdered lover (TIME, Nov. 21).

PORGY--Song, chatter and heartbreak in the negro quarter along the Charleston waterfront (TIME, Oct. 24).

Other well regarded serious plays are ESCAPE; Civic REPERTORY THEATRE; THE IRISH PLAYERS; BEHOLD, THE BRIDEGROOM; CAPONSACCHI.

MELODRAMA

THE TRIAL OF MARY DUGAN--Court-room chronicle of the fair "Follies" girl charged with murder in the first degree (TIME, Oct. 3).

INTERFERENCE--A famed, faultlessly domestic London doctor is very properly agitated when his wife's first husband re-turns from the grave (TIME, Oct. 31).

BROADWAY--Two of Manhattan's leading criminals meet in a night club and shoot it out (TIME, Sept. 27, 1926).

THE RACKET--Gangsters and politics make a shambles out of a Chicago police station (TIME., Dec. 12).

Other able melodramas: NIGHTSTICK, DRACULA.

FUNNY

THE DOCTOR'S DILEMMA--George Bernard Shaw heckles the medical profession under the benevolent auspices of The Theatre Guild (TIME, Dec. 5).

BURLESQUE--Hearts of gold beat under the spangles of life on the burlesque wheel (TIME, Sept. 12).

THE COMMAND TO LOVE--Something worse than death appears to be included in the duties of foreign diplomats (TIME, Oct. 3).

THE ROYAL FAMILY--A somewhat dreamlike day with the scions of a great stage dynasty (TIME, Jan. 9).

THE TAMING OF THE SHREW--Shake-speare in silk stockings and bobbed hair (TIME, Nov. 7).

MUSICAL

Evenings evaporate easily at: Show Boat; A Connecticut Yankee; Hit the Deck; Funny Face; Manhattan Mary; Good News.

*Thc Road to Rome, The Love Nest.