New Plays in Manhattan

Once In A Lifetime. Although George S. Kaufman has rarely written a play all by himself, he has brightened many a theatrical season with shows in whose making he collaborated (June Moon, Beggar on Horseback, Dulcy, Merton Of The Movies). With Moss Hart the whimsically insane Kaufman touch has surpassed itself in producing Once In A Lifetime, a merciless, hilariously funny lampoon on Hollywood and the cerebral content of its creatures. The only possible adverse criticism of the play might come from spectators for the near savagery of some of the blows which Mr. Kaufman deals to cinema folk with his relentless jester's bladder.

The story on which so much cyclonic satire is hung concerns a smalltime vaudeville team of which the smartest member is Jean Dixon (the acidic wife in June Moon). The least gifted member is Hugh O'Connell, a ludicrous gentleman who had the part of a half-drunk reporter in The Racket, a completely drunk reporter in Gentlemen of the Press. The first indication of Mr. O'Connell's competence appears when Miss Dixon asks him what he is reading. "Variety" he replies. "Why don't you read something written in English?" "Oh, it's in English," says Mr. O'Connell. "It's got theatrical news from all over the world, but it's written in English."

The team, almost broke, becomes fired with the idea that inasmuch as the infant film industry is just learning to talk, there ought to be money in an elocution school in Hollywood. Their subsequent adventures through the fantastic world that Messrs Kaufman & Hart have located on the West Coast are crowded with humor. Nowhere could Once In A Lifetime receive better appreciation than on the legitimate stage of Broadway where prestige and livelihoods have been jeopardized by the microphones and cameras of California. Once In A Lifetime is really Broadway's Revenge.

The more absurd the mistakes of Mr. O'Connell--who is made a production manager--become, the more remarkable his feats appear to the cinema people. At the final curtain, when Cinemagnate Glogauer learns that by some addle-pated order of Mr. O'Connell's a gang of workmen have come to tear the studio down, he hesitates for just a moment and then cries, "Tell them to go ahead!"

One might suppose that such a Swiftian critique of the motion picture business springs from an attack of cinematic sour grapes on the part of either Mr. Hart or Mr. Kaufman, who makes his first stage appearance in the part of a disappointed author. Actually, neither man has ever been to Hollywood. But each has spent 30 min. in a studio at Astoria. L. I.

Fine & Dandy. With due regard for the quality of Comedian Joe Cook's past performances, it may be safely said that Fine & Dandy is his grandest, maddest exhibition to date. Always a good hand at mechanical contraptions, this year he has placed himself in ideal surroundings--the

Fordyce Drop Forge & Tool Factory. His first appearaace is as a common workman--though later he becomes general manager--going to his job with his dinner pail. The dinner pail is the size of an automobile crate and it contains a hogshead of coffee. From this point on the audience is relieved of all sense of proportion and reason.

In the course of his monkeyshines, during which he pauses occasionally to juggle, dance, sing, play & tumble, versatile Mr. Cook introduces several hundred startling prop laughs. Always genial and ingratiating, he does everything from lighting Dave Chasen's mustache to making a hole-in-one with a small coal shovel.

With a triple-threat comedian--gags, feats, chatter--like Mr. Cook, it is difficult to apportion due credit for the amount of humor contributed by Donald Ogden Stewart's book. Audiences found the entire production an example of clever professional showmanship, the farce consistent even to the theme-song, which concludes: How's your uncle? I haven't got an uncle. Then I hope that he is fine & dandy too.

The Greeks Had A Word For It. Although the word remains a secret to Playwright Zoe Akins, it probably has something to do with Mrs. Warren's profession. The three prime movers of the story are ladies of easy virtue who like the same kind of money. One is prudent, one is predatory, one is impulsive. They cheerfully admit being "thicker than thieves and more adventurous than the Three Musketeers." But their interests are not always common. Jean, the predatory, willowy Italian blonde, keeps stealing men away from Polaire (Muriel Kirkland), the redheaded, impulsive one. To do this Jean resorts to such tactics as removing her clothing, merely wearing a coat when she cajoles gentlemen into seeing her home. . In spite of the constant wrangling which her activities precipitate, the final curtain finds them all reunited, unchanged.

Miss Akins has managed to throw together three entirely unrelated acts--the first smut comedy, the second society drama, the third travesty. Sprinkled here and there is amusing dialogue. The three ladies are characters, their gentlemen friends are only inflated haberdashery.

A Farewell to Arms. Laurence Stallings was a co-author of What Price Glory and of Rainbow. Best that can be said of his adaptation of Ernest Hemingway's bit ter, static War novel is that Mr. Stallings has attempted to interpolate little of his own material. Worst that can be said is that his editing of Hemingway's material is questionable. None of the close-knit Hemingway scenes were without importance: they were all inseparable and significant. By eliminating such memorable sequences as Lieut. Henry's wounding, his escape into Switzerland with Nurse Catherine Barkley (which would have been almost impossible to dramatize), Mr. Stallings has given his play a hurried, ragged, not always coherent atmosphere.

There are, however, not a few good features about the performance, chief of which is the fact that the two principals, Glenn Anders (Strange Interlude, Hotel Universe) and Elissa Landi (an English newcomer to the U. S. stage) appear to readers of the book to be ideally suited to the parts they play.

A Farewell to Arms is the story of their meeting, wooing, mating and her death in childbirth during the Caporetto retreat of 1917. There are numerous incidental characters who inhabit the play as they did the novel; but in the novel they were neat carvings on a walnut shell. In the play they are thinned and twisted into a helter-skelter, rag-rug pattern. Mr. Stallings is not to be censured for what he has done in all force and sincerity. But it takes more than force to expand a small frieze and keep it significant.

Frankie & Johnnie. The best that can be said of Frankie & Johnnie is that it is a well-staged lithograph. Scenes along the St. Louis river front are ably documented, the light ladies, gamblers, saloon inhabitants are clothed without anachronism. The plot adheres rather faithfully to the plot of the song. Most variations of the ballad agree that Frankie (a harlot) and Johnnie (a pander) were lovers-- "And Oh, my God how they did love." Pledging eternal faithfulness, Frankie proceeds to support Johnnie, attiring him in "hundred-dollar" suits. Then it appears that Johnnie is philandering with a lady called Nellie Bly.* Frankie learns where an assignation is being kept by Johnnie and Nellie. Three times she shoots him ("roota-toot-toot") because she feels "he done her wrong." The ballad can be sung in about 20 minutes. It would be less tedious if Mr. Kirkland's play took no longer to unfold. Frankie is Anne Forrest; Johnnie is Frank McGlynn Jr.

*Her name, not her character, may have been borrowed from the Nellie Bly (Elizabeth Cochrane) who went around the world in 72 days, 6 hr. II min., as a stunt for the New York World in 1889-90.

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