New Plays in Manhattan

Jamboree (by Jack Black & Bessie Beatty; Elizabeth Miele, producer). Author Black is a graduate of five penitentiaries, was pried loose from a 25-year prison term and helped to overcome his addiction to narcotics by mustachioed Editor Fremont Older of the San Francisco Call-Bulletin. This play is a dramatization of Black's book You Can't Win. A program note testifies: "Every character in this play is drawn from the personal experiences of Jack Black during his years as a criminal or as a prisoner. The types are real and these people actually lived." They do not live in Mr. Black's melodrama.

Plot: A Pocatello, Idaho madame, wronged in youth, sits in the centre of a web of rootin', tootin', shootin' lawlessness. Her name is Salt Chunk Mary. But although she conducts a thieves' den and liquor saloon, Salt Chunk is violently opposed to white slavery, has a 14-karat heart. To her resort comes a youthful badman who soon pokes his neck in the shadow of the gallows. Salt Chunk, drawn to him by some strange fascination, makes him promise to go straight, helps him escape with the sweetheart he has picked up in her place, dies of the bullet intended for him just after discovering that the boy is her long lost son.

Firebird (by Lajos Zelahy; Gilbert Miller, producer). Zoltan Balkanyi (Ian Keith) was a matinee idol in Buda-Pesth. He also was a devil with the ladies, some of whom did not care for his lustful attentions. One of these was Karola Lovasdy (Judith Anderson), wife of a onetime diplomat (Henry Stephenson) who owned the apartment in which the unwholesome Balkanyi lived. When the actor is discovered dead there is evidence that dark-eyed Actress Anderson is the guilty party. Her apoplectic husband comes to think so, too. Finally he and the rest of the cast are sure of it when she hysterically confesses to have been the dead man's mistress and murderess. Don't you believe it.

George White's Music Hall Varieties eschews the lavish surroundings with which Producer White used to set his Scandals, offers little new material but three bags full of entertainment in the persons of Lili Damita, Harry Richman, Bert Lahr.

Singer Richman has never had such an antiphonal background for his song "I Love A Parade." Miss Damita and her torrent of red hair appears even more charming than she was in Sons o' Guns. But black-banged Eleanor Powell, possibly the best lady tap-dancer in the business, gives her a race for being the most attractive female in the cast. Funnyman Lahr's noisy gullet has seldom been put to wider use.. He is successively a slightly bewildered master of a trained dog act ("to train dogs takes a lot of time, patience--and dogs"); an imitator of mammy-singers and Clifton Webb; a manufacturer of bath-tub gin; the victim of a barber's nervous-handed wife; a man undergoing the third-degree and sticking to his "lullaby."

Top price of White's Varieties is $2.50--and worth it.

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