New Plays in Manhattan

All the King's Men. It is a year since Walter Fairchild (Grant Mitchell) became a widower. Walter, slogan-spouting adman, is about to take himself a new wife. She, Florence Wendell (Mayo Methot) is to meet Junior Fairchild, Walter's 10-year-old son, and everybody hopes everybody else will like everybody else. Meanwhile Florence, inspecting the Fairchild apartment on Riverside Drive, feels she-doesn't-exactly-know-how in an apartment which was furnished by Walter's first wife and now is inhabited by her spirit. Florence wants to live in the East Sixties. Walter wants his western clients to be im-pressed with the Riverside Drive address, thinks Westerners are unaware of the smartness of the East Side. They are married, move to the East Side, buy new furniture.

A year passes. Florence is within a few hours of maternity when a cable comes from Switzerland. Junior, at a fashionable school, is dying of typhoid fever. Walter, distrait, ignoring the living Florence and her unborn child, arranges for a quick trip to Switzerland. He leaves, but not before she has spoken her piece.

Another year. Florence has had her baby and lived. Junior has recovered and is at school in Connecticut. Walter's business has trebled. But a hiatus has occurred in the duet of Florence & Walter. Things have not been the same since he chose between her and his son. An old admirer asks Florence to elope with him; she is on the verge of so doing but the old admirer refuses to let her take along her baby. That spoils the elopement. Walter at this point comes barging in, flower-laden, to find Florence at the telephone asking Junior, whom she has never welcomed, to come home.

Fulton Oursler has written sensitively this dissertation on the second-mate theme. The cast all do well, but most distinguished is Mrs. Jacques Martin as Rhodey, old-time nurse.

Fioretta. Inscribed over the stage door of the Earl Carroll Theatre, where passers-by on 50th Street may see it and be impressed, is the legend: "Through these portals pass the most beautiful girls in the world." This vanity of Earl Carroll's is not without some justification: the vapid beauty of his mannequins, who haughtily undulate to the clinking music of gold in the Carroll coffers, is without superior in any professional or amateur congress of pulchritude. Awareness of beauty in women seems to be developed in Showman Carroll to a degree beyond that of any of his competitors. More than this cannot be said in favor of Fioretta, but this should be said.

The piece, described as a musical comedy with a Venetian background, concerns the love of Fioretta (Dorothy Knapp) for a count. The complication which besets all love is, in this case, the roue Duke of Venice. His Grace has ruled against duelling and when Fioretta's Count breaks the rule he is sentenced to be hanged. Fioretta is a peasant. So that she may attain the social status required by the Duke, the Count is blindfolded and married to Fioretta. In payment for this service, he gets his sentence changed from hanging to shooting. But in the end, of course, Fioretta saves and takes the Count.

The music is banal, the settings are gorgeous. Dorothy Knapp is a pretty girl. The debatable dignity of the legitimate stage is lent to the proceeding by the presence of Lionel Atwill. Leon Errol is there for fun, so is Fannie Brice, but the best they could give Fannie Brice was a song about "What Did Cleopatra Have That I Haven't Got?" which is funny only because Fannie Brice is funny. A burro named Geranium, the best laugh in the show, is singularly well-behaved--far more so than the donkey which appeared in Rainbow.

Be Your Age. Self-consciously naughty, the high moment of this piece occurs when Grandmother Merriam (Spring Byington), rejuvenated by young Dr. Gage's (Romney Brent) glandular injection, submits to the doctor's emotional soundings. The grandmother, a wealthy widow, was unfaithful to her husband at one point during her life. In a rash moment she confessed her dereliction to Bishop Bradford (Holliwell Hobbes) and most of the remainder of her life has been spent in giving baptismal fonts and hospital wards to atone. At the diocesan hospital, Dr. Gage, having made certain experiments with white rabbits, lacks a human volunteer for experimental purposes. Mrs. Merriam offers herself and is given pituitary, thyroidal, interstitial excitation. Mrs. Merriam, some 60-odd years old, soon reverts to a dashing 39. She takes-a new interest in clothes, furniture and the physician. He, though completely in love with Mrs. Merriam's granddaughter, is scientifically ardent and ardently scientific enough to carry his experiment to a physiological conclusion--but Mrs. Merriam catches cold, sneezes herself back to senility and to her first love, a now white-haired diplomat who leans on a stick. The piece is not bad fun and it is aptly acted, though to most people the gland theme would seem to have passed beyond all hope of rejuvenation.

Albert Carroll-Carola Goya. The croaking and lilting of Albert Carroll, noted impersonator of noted persons, is strange stuff to any theatregoer who is ignorant of the foibles of the famed. Appreciation of the Carroll caricatures presupposes a working knowledge of such things as Jane Cowl's 'kerchief-twisting, the nose-scratching of James John-Walker, the rigid stride of Ruth Draper, the head-tossing of Minnie Maddern Fiske. So skillful is Carroll, however, that his current performance is believed to constitute an evening's entertainment, supplemented only by Carola Goya, a Spanish-dancing lady. She, pressagented by her father, S. M. Weller, dances with a certain naive sternness, with a vestal fire that leaves her audience, of which she is conscientiously aware, stirred but not startled.

Impersonator Carroll, ablest in his metier, has progressed from a sandwiched spot in The Grand Street Follies (brainy, cheaply-produced annual revue) to a local institution.