New Plays in Manhattan

Face the Music is a timely, satirical musicomedy which ordains itself to laugh and sing away the Depression. Scene I discloses a host of newly pauperized millionaires lunching gaily at the Automat, while a sightly chorus chants: See Mr. Whitney passing by, Putting mustard on a Swiss-on-Rye . . . There's Mrs. William Randolp Hearst, Saying, "That's my place I got there first!"

Written by Moss Hart and directed by George S. Kaufman, two genuinely funny men who collaborated on Once In A Lifetime, Face the Music's showmanlike libretto spares few phases of the contemporary metropolitan scene its breathless lampooning.

Times would indeed appear to be bad. You can see Ethel Barrymore, Professor Einstein and Tony the Wonder Horse at the Palace Theatre for 5-c-, with a free lunch thrown in. Roxy's theatre is showing four feature films and giving away a room and bath for a dime. Another equally disastrous theatrical season, it is prophesied, and the show business will be back to the magic lantern. But there are people who still have plenty of money. They are Policeman Meshbesher (Hugh O'Connell) and those other fortunates who have been able to buy a seat on the force. It is Mrs. Meshbesher (Mary Boland) who declares that she has so many diamonds "you can see me from Yonkers." When Inquisitor Samuel Seabury (see p. 13) threatens the policemen with an investigation, they decide to conceal their opulence by financing a revue, The Rhinestones of 1932. High spot of this durbar, which must have cost Producer Sam H. Harris himself a good deal of money, is a lavish rhinestone Venetian scene, complete with half-a-dozen flights of rhinestone pigeons.

Face the Music slows up toward the end by the sheer weight of its extravagance in a courtroom scene in the Earl Carroll manner, but it would be a churlish critic indeed who would not admit that it is the most impressive musical show in town and one of the two funniest.

J. Harold Murray does most of the singing, assisted by taffy-haired Katherine Carrington, a lovely theatrical newcomer with a mouth like a D on its back. Irving Berlin (Israel Baline) appears to have reopened a few old scores for his music, but "A Roof in Manhattan" is memorably tuneful.

Lou Holtz Revue. That impertinent comedian Lou Holtz has assembled two hours of first-rate vaudeville. Continuity lies in the fact that Mr. Holtz introduces the numbers. His talent includes Clark & McCullough, Vincent Lopez's orchestra and a concluding scene which depicts Paul Revere's ride with a view of two lights shining from a miniature church steeple and a real horse galloping on a treadmill.

Collision. Olga (June Walker) pretends to be in love with a celebrated musician in order to spur the attentions of her real attachment, Dr. Gestzi (Geoffrey Kerr). Unhappily the musician is reported missing in a train wreck. So Olga feigns insanity, declares that Dr. Gestzi is her missing fiance. Wise therapist, he humors her with a honeymoon, drugs her when she becomes unmaidenly and finally wakes up to the notion that he is in love with her himself.

Collision is adapted from the German by John Anderson, New York Journal theatre critic who revised The Fatal Alibi. His confreres did not fail to flay his present flimsy farce, observing that Critic Anderson would have done likewise.

Wild Waves is a well-intended play about the fauna which infest a third-rate radio station belonging to the recent firecracker school of playwrighting that got underway about the time that Broadway was produced. As a portrait of the sort of station where the accompanist does his own announcing, where a befuddled Negro rings all the time-signals and most of the other work is done by one harried man, Wild Waves is novel and, according to oldtime radio folk, valid. Unhappily its author, Radio Dramatist William Ford Manley, has the notion that the source of rapid-fire comedy lies in the ability of each character to say the most boorish thing he can think of to every other character. As a result, Wild Waves is chiefly notable for displaying 45 of the most disagreeable people imaginable. There are definitely funny lines and situations, but since the line seems to be the unit of the playwright's thought, Wild Waves is hopelessly muddled as to motivation and plot. The many admirers of Osgood Perkins ( The Front Page, Uncle Vanya, The Wiser They Are) can only hope that he soon gets a better job, of which it would appear he will presently be in need.

There's Always Juliet. John Van Druten (Young Woodley) tells the tale of an English girl (Edna Best) and a young American (Herbert Marshall) who fall head-over-heels in love with each other at first sight. They have been acquainted only two days when he is called back to Manhattan to look after his architectural business. He offers marriage, and for the first time they sit down soberly and try to find out about each other. He has been wed before, divorced, has a child in Colorado. These revelations suddenly turn a carefree romance into a very serious, grown-up affair. They decide to cancel out the whole thing. But chance and another cablegram offer the two lovers a second opportunity. This time they embrace it.

Playwright Van Druten has presented his compassionate little comedy with extraordinary persuasiveness and grace. And he has taken occasion to seed his play, first produced in London, with good-natured transatlantic jibes calculated to tickle audiences on either side of the ocean.

No stranger to the U. S. stage, Edna Best was last seen in this country in Melo. Actor Marshall, her husband, was the wise and witty scientist, last year, in Philip Barry's Tomorrow & Tomorrow. Great Britain need not envy the U. S. its Lunts so long as the ingratiating Marshalls carry on. Third of There's Always Juliet's cast of four is May Whitty, a Dame of the British Empire. Impersonating a sort of female super-butler, she has found an infinite and amazing number of ways of saying her chief line which is "Yes, Miss."

Since it is British, amusing and concerned with a love affair, There's Always Juliet will inevitably be compared with uproarious Private Lives. Less noisy than Noel Coward's play, There's Always Juliet should not suffer by the comparison.

Trick For Trick. Azrah (James Rennie) and the Great La Tour (Henry O'Neill) were rival magicians. To solve a girl's murder, Azrah bets $1,000 that he can make her speak from the beyond, name her slayer. The Great La Tour bets he can not. There follows a great deal of lowering and upping of stage lights. During one dark spell the Great La Tour is killed. During another, on the first night, Critic Percy Hammond of the Herald Tribune disappeared. It was all right about the Great La Tour, however, because he turned out to have been a seducer of young girls.

If you enjoy seeing inkwells explode, crystals float off the stage and ectoplasmic bodies rise and wiggle upstairs, you will like Trick For Trick. It offers a happy combination of melodrama and the atmosphere of a Thurston matinee.

When The Bough Breaks. After an absence of more than eight years, Pauline Frederick has returned to the Broadway stage in an unflattering vehicle. On The Silver Cord theme, this play is aimed at the machinations of unwholesome maternal love. Miss Frederick is called upon, in her part as the selfish mother, to frustrate her son's opportunity for adventure in business, to blight his romance with the girl he loves and, ultimately, to lose his slavish unnatural devotion. Not one scrap of her miserably written play rings true.

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