New Plays in Manhattan

He, If God did not exist, said the sardonic Voltaire, it would be necessary to invent one. With a rare burst of creative imagination, a God has been invented for the first play of the Theatre Guild's 14th season. Author of He is Alfred Savoir. He himself exists in the attractive mortal envelope of Tom Powers, not to be confused with Eugene Powers who is also among the comedy's cast as a learned professor.

At a hotel in the Swiss Alps a congress of Free Thinkers is being held. As the convention is meeting a young man walks in, announces himself as Jehovah visiting his earth. At first he is laughed at, then curious and portentous things begin to happen. A blizzard cuts the hotel off from the outside world. A glacier moves down on the hostelry, assuring certain death to all the guests. The Free Thinkers reconsider, elect "Monsieur God" president. Then the cooks rebel, led by a Napoleonic elevator man (Claude Rains). The scullery boys rebel against the cooks, lock up the head chef in the icebox. Whip in hand, the elevator man appeals to M. God for support, not that, he believes in him, but because the rest of the people do.

"Haven't I seen you before? Where were you born?" asks M. God, puzzled and amused.

"Corsica."

"Ah," says M. God, bowing deferentially. Arm in arm they march off the stage, not only stop the rebellion but put the servants to work digging them out of the glacier. Because he detests ostentation. M. God has refused to perform any miracles himself.

Toward the end, when he thinks he has failed to make Violet Kemble Cooper love him, M. God doubts himself. He regains his composure, however, by the time the keeper of the lunatic asylum comes to reclaim him. "If God came to earth," shrewdly explains M. God, "where else could he stay?" Left alone for a moment he makes his escape by walking out through the audience.

Needless to say, the Guild has set and acted this magnificent comedy magnificently.

The Constant Sinner. Three seasons ago Mae West's lusty singing of "Frankie and Johnnie" and the nostalgic flavor of bar and brothel scenes made Diamond Lil a Broadway hit. In The Constant Sinner, which Mae West wrote from her own novel, the bars and brothels are Harlem, 1931, and Mae West does not sing. But The Constant Sinner is no tame play, nor is it a dull play. Though handicapped by a more effete period, Mae West in some of her lines attains the lush bawdiness of her earlier production: "That dame [Cleopatra] went in for everything . . . she even went to bed with snakes." "I never turn anything down but the bed-covers." She plays the part of Prostitute Babe Gordon with a forthright enthusiasm, sometimes tempered by irony, as in the curtain line, after she has convinced her husband that she is not living with another man (which she is) and the husband has mouthed a few platitudes about Faith. Says Babe Gordon: "I used to know a fine poem about Faith. It begins--Oh, Hell! I've forgotten it."

George White's Scandals is lightsome, for the most part pleasing entertainment. Producer White enlivened proceedings on the opening night by staging an impromptu fist fight in the theatre lobby with his librettist Lew Brown.

Framed by tasteful Joseph Urban, dressed by Charles LeMaire, the production starts off with a musical satire on the Empire State Building. Point of the jibe is that the skyscraper has insufficient sanitary facilities: "There are three on every floor; there should have been four." Following this scatalog in quick succession come shapely Song-Shouter Ethel Merman (nee Zimmerman) who was in Girl-Crazy, funny Willie & Eugene Howard (Willie is also late of Girl Crazy), a splendid dancer named Ray Bolger who has weak knees, sure feet. There is also Everett Marshall, who has brought his fine voice up the street from the Metropolitan Opera House to sing a long rigmarole called "That's Why Darkies Were Born." In the final throes of this extravaganza occurs a glimpse of Heaven in which the audience is led to imagine that Producer White imagines that Negroes imagine they will all turn, on the other side of Jordan, into beautiful, naked white chorus girls.

Piece de resistance of the White durbar is Crooner Rudy Vallee. He submits good-naturedly to some mild joshing, does not seem to mind when Willie Howard asks him if he is related to the Lehigh Valleys, sings several numbers with & without a megaphone.

To wizened Willie Howard goes most of the credit for the show's fun. Rushing headlong through scene after scene, he is successively and inexhaustibly a plumber, a French general, a Hungarian doctor, a tabloid editor, a victim to his lawyer ("For Gott sake gif him de two dollas!"), a mustachioed French lover crawling over a blonde in a gondola.

Since Lyricist Bud De Sylva left the team of De Sylva, Brown & Henderson a faint note of illiteracy has crept into the words of the remaining pair's songs. Mr. Vallee, A.B. Yale 1927, must wince a little when he has to sing:

Life is just a bowl of cherries.

Why take it serious,

It's too mysterious?

I Love an Actress is a flimsy trifle in the Molnar manner, translated from the Hungarian of Laszlo Fodor. It is directed and produced by Chester Erskin, the man who put the final and triumphant touch of grimness into Subway Express and The Last Mile. The same note of grimness has unfortunately thrust itself into I Love an Actress, producing an effect not unlike that of a wispy Marie Laurencin drawing surrounded by a baroque gilt frame. Joe Mielziner has done sets that are too gorgeous for any actor to be funny in front of.

The story relates the adventures of a famed actress (Muriel Kirkland of Strictly Dishonorable and The Greeks Had a Word for It) who is pursued by the richest merchant in all Hungary (Ernest Glendenning) and a poor young engineer (Walter Abel). It takes four padded scenes, in which sub-characters pop in and out with the sombre precision of a cuckoo clock, and the conclusive click of a train gate to force the right pair into each other's arms.

Singin' The Blues is a Negro melodrama with which has been combined, none too skillfully, a full-fledged revue containing a chorus, two orchestras, a choir, four dancing teams and two whistlable songs. The melodrama, concerning the efforts of a murderer to escape from Harlem and get back to Georgia (where presumably nobody would think of punishing him for killing a Negro policeman), is made plausible by the intelligent acting of Frank Wilson (Porgy) as the fugitive torn between self-preservation and love, and Isabell Washington, the siren who will not let him go. The revue scenes alone make Singin' The Blues well worth seeing. Good numbers: the Four Flash Devils tap dancing; Wen Talbert's Choir "Singin' The Blues;" Isabell Washington covering her lover's escape with a pistol and a song "It's the Darnedest Thing."

Fast & Furious is as good entertainment of its kind as there is, far better than most Negro musicals. The orchestra pit, under the direction of Maestro Joe Jordon, is a hotbed of rhythm, contains among other things a thwacking bass ("dog house") fiddle and several excellent trumpets. There is always good dancing in such revues. In Fast & Furious this department is ably conducted by Lee ("Boots") Marshall, Clinton ("Dusty") Fletcher, and an enthusiastic quartet known as the Four Dancing Boys. A note of classicism is introduced by Dancer Edna Guy, a coal-black member of the Ruth St. Denis School who sways capably through an East Indian Nautch.

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