Bread & Circuses

Roman Emperors kept their people happy with bread and circuses. A lot of bread is being given away nowadays and John D. Rockefeller Jr. gives a generous share. But in a republic the citizens pick their own circuses, pay to get in. Last week came evidence that Mr. Rockefeller had missed a big guess at what would amuse people nowadays. Radio-Keith-Orpheum Corp. announced abruptly last week the end of monster Radio City Music Hall, in Manhattan's Rockefeller Center, as a variety house.

People in show business were surprised, but only because the end had come so quickly, less than three weeks after the opening (TIME, Jan. 2). Henceforth, said R-K-0, the world's largest theatre (6,200 seats), would present films and stage entertainment of the orthodox cinemansion type. *Prophetically, the first picture scheduled was The Bitter Tea of General Yen. As soon as Rockefeller Center's huge (3,700-seat) R-K-O Roxy Theatre, down the street from the Music Hall, finishes running its current film, it will be closed. Undaunted, R-K-O promised future spectacles there "such as Broadway never saw before"--in other words, the sort of thing that was supposed to have been staged in the Music Hall.

Entertainment businessmen wondered why and how John Davison Rockefeller Jr. got into the spectacle business.

When the Music Hall opened with four hours of the most elephantine and pedestrian of vaudevillian showmanship, most Manhattan critics, reluctant to lambaste such an enormous and financially precarious enterprise, confined their reviews to a catalog of the theatre's mechanical ingenuities and the roster of talent presented. But square-minded Pundit Walter Lippmann of the Herald Tribune wrote: "For such a theatre it would be necessary to create some radically new kind of spectacle. . . . [The entrepreneurs] were like men who had built the Leviathan and were trying to use it as a ferry boat to Staten Island, who had built a great pedestal to sustain a peanut. . . . Among rational men such a theatre might be built because there was a great art that required such a theatre. But here the theatre has been built first, and for years to come the question will be what in thunder to do with it."

One school of thought gave Realtor Rockefeller more credit for foresight than did Pundit Lippmann. It was pointed out that the Music Hall--conceived in 1929 and erected at Depression prices for some $5,000,000--cost $2,000,000 less than the older, smaller Roxy Theatre on Seventh Avenue, world's second largest. It was argued that the selection of Samuel Lionel ("Roxy") Rothafel, onetime Marine, for the Music Hall's first director was logical. Roxy had conceived the Roxy Theatre super-show as a gaudy decoration .for film bills, the nearest thing to a spectacle that Tycoon Rockefeller and his advisers knew of. But. said Rockefeller sympathizers, Realtor Rockefeller was building for the future. If & when someone came along with a super-super-show, he would have the place to put it on.

Fact remained that even if the public had packed all the seats of the Music Hall twice daily, the margin of profit, after taking out Roxy's $100,000 weekly overhead, would have been extremely small. Showmen recalled the old Hippodrome, last seat of spectacles. There one used to be able to witness such theatrical colossi as herds of performing elephants, tanks full of mermaidens, the siege of Port Arthur, the capture of Veracruz. Public apathy landed the spectacular old Hippodrome on the rocks in 1929. As holder of one of the largest individual stakes in the U. S. entertainment business, Mr. Rockefeller must have known about that.

This week at Williamsburg, Va., whose Colonial charm the Rockefeller family has been busy restoring, opened another Rockefeller-built R-K-O film theatre seating 560 patrons. This property is a very tiny drop indeed in Mr. Rockefeller's bucket of show business holdings. Recently the Rockefellers acquired 100,000 shares of R-K-O securities "as a result of rental adjustments" at Radio City. Mr. Rockefeller is also the handle on a whip whose popper is another entertainment chain. He is reputed one of the largest stockholders in Chase National Bank. Chase National is the banking sponsor of General Theatres Equipment Corp. (in receivership), which controls Fox Film Corp. with which is affiliated Film Securities Corp. which controls Loew's Inc.

New Plays in Manhattan

Girls in Uniform (by Christa Winsloe; Sidney Phillips, producer). First it was a novel, then a play, then a film. Now Playwright Winsloe's Maedchen in Uniform is to be seen in a translated version of its second phase, not nearly so satisfactory as its third. Without cinematic evidence of the many little rigors in the Prussian school for officers' daughters to which Manuela is sent, Manuela's adolescent tortures lack credibility. The best the play can do is to show a score of submissive young girls marching under the iron eye of limping Headmistress von Nordeck; to state that their food and heat are to be curtailed (although the young ladies on the stage seem plump and warm enough); to picture them tucked into a dormitory full of little white beds which would have very little terror for U. S. boarding school girls.

The original idea behind Girls in Uniform calls for atmospheric rather than dramatic presentation. The simple story: Manuela discovers happiness in her scholastic exile until she finds that her devotion to her teacher is regarded as a far more heinous infraction of the rules than passing notes. Possibly because most of them did not understand German, U. S. filmgoers were struck by the shy fragility of this relationship. The sense of grey imprisonment, so successfully captured on the screen, is almost entirely lost on the stage. As if to atone for lack of convincing atmosphere, those responsible for Girls in Uniform have made the entente between Manuela and the teacher unwholesomely explicit--a doubtful benefit. And to cap that, Manuela of the play actually manages to destroy herself instead of making an abortive stab at it. Point of the cinema was that the frustrated little girl did not escape from the school, an institution not intended to be merely the scene of juvenile tantrums but something far more organic, the inflexibility of life itself.

Acting honors of Girls in Uniform go to Florence Williams (Manuela), a young woman of sparse theatrical experience, discovered in R. H. Macy's department store. Cool, clean Rose Hobart (last seen in I Loved You Wednesday) as the beloved teacher tries desperately to apply astringent to a situation which often comes uncomfortably and needlessly close to abnormality.

Saint Wench (by John Colton; Helen Menken, producer). Playwright John Colton is the man who wrote The Shanghai Gesture, co-dramatized a William Somerset Maugham story into Rain. Helen Menken of the thin face and beech-leaf hair accomplished emotional successes in Seventh Heaven, The Infinite Shoeblack, The Captive. It is to be recorded with reluctance that Mr. Colton's Saint Wench, acted in and managed by Miss Menken, is an unconscionable bore, a pitiably uninspired piece of stagecraft.

The play deals with "some intimate and hitherto unchronicled chapters in the early life of Saint Mara of Trabia," a Croatian woman whose name appears on no church calendar. As the saint. Actress Menken is compelled to choose between a life with a robber called Kristan the Wolf or with a secular gentleman named Josef. The secular gentleman wins out, and toward the close of the play one sees Saint Mara working miracles upon "a man with a twisted foot," "a man with a curved spine" and "a boy with devils"--the latter being Ethel Barrymore's boy John Drew Colt.

*Among those thrown out of work by the Music Hall's switch from variety to films was Stage Designer Robert Edmond Jones, who tendered hi? resignation.

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