New Plays in Manhattan

Strike Me Pink (words, music & production by Lew Brown & Ray Henderson) had its premiere in the null manner. Opening night tickets were printed in pink & gilt. There were pink roses for the ladies, pink carnations for the gentlemen. Even in such an atmosphere of anti-Depression bravado, one might have expected a bank moratorium audience to be unresponsive. Such was not the case. With Wartime cheeriness, first-nighters rewarded an optimistic but routine number called "It's Great to Be Alive," sung by dark little Gracie Barrie, with a storm of applause. When the tall and attractive chorus chanted "Roosevelt Is President" in the Of Thee I Sing manner, there was a ringing ovation.

Potato-nosed Jimmy Durante, the living composite of Manhattan cab drivers, did not have to work hard for his laughs. Covered with characteristic confusion, Funnyman Durante finds himself trying to climb over the orchestra pit to assert his identity when an impostor is introduced on stage in the second scene. He appears to be, as usual, utterly unable to control his feelings. He shakes his parrotlike head, hurls his hat at the band, indulges his ignorant fondness for British idioms, tells the old one about the floorwalker who thought he was about to be kicked by the dog, sings snatches of his famed night-club songs, "Data," "I Can Do Without Broadway," "Jimmy the Well-Dressed Man.',' Mr. Durante feels that the crowning indignity heaped upon him in this show is his being made to appear, finally, in a full-dress suit. "Am I mor-ti-fied!" he cries. "Brown & Henderson, he made me do it. I feel like a magician!"

Self-sufficient Hope Williams is called upon to insert the Park Avenue element into the proceedings. As in The New Yorkers, in which she was also associated with uncouth Mr. Durante, she does not have much to do except feed him a few lines. Lively Lupe Velez, having abandoned most of the Mexican accent she affected in Ziegfeld's Hot-Cha, spends most of her time shaking herself at Funnyman Durante, which calls forth from him the bitter remark: "Now they're makin' me a juvenile!"

Theme-song of Strike Me Pink is as exhilarating a fox-trot as the team of Brown & Henderson has turned out for some years:

Strike me pink if I don't think

I'm jailing in love!

Strike me blue if I don't think

It's you . . .

Hal Le Roy of the spidery legs does some excellent eccentric dancing. Johnny Downs, the real juvenile, sings and dances ably. Other good tunes: "Let's Call It a Day," "Memories."

Both Your Houses (by Maxwell Anderson; Theatre Guild, producer) is high propagandist art. Playwright Anderson (Saturday's Children, Elizabeth the Queen) bases his tract on an heroic premise : that all save one of the nation's 435 Congressmen are crooked. The honest one is a young school-teacher from Nevada named Allan McClean (Shepperd Strudwick), junior member of the House Appropriations Committee.

Chairman of the Committee is Simeon Gray (Robert Strange). The Depression is about to wreck Chairman Gray's long record for square dealing. There is an appropriation in H. R. 2,007 which will build a penitentiary in his town, save the bank of which he is majority stockholder and which verges on collapse with criminal reverberations. Unable to obstruct general Congressional plundering by any other means, visionary Representative McClean maneuvers the committee into tagging onto H. R. 2,007 graft so obviously villainous that the measure will either be killed on the floor or face a Presidential veto. At the last moment, however, Nevada's McClean tosses away his victory. He is in love with Chairman Gray's daughter, does not want to see her father go to jail.

Virginia's Fitzmaurice (Walter C. Kelly, "the Virginia Judge" of vaudeville), a lovable old pirate who has philosophically raided the U. S. Treasury for years, is the pragmatic spokesman for the side of unrighteousness. A colored waiter in the House Restaurant at one point approaches him, saying: "Mistuh Fitzmaurice, I read in the papers that this bill is a bad thing This heah Gov'ment is costing a sight too much--a sight." When Congressman Fitzmaurice reminds him that curtailment of government expense would jeopardize his job, the practical blackamoor decides that his "head has just been turned by reading matter. I'd ruther we dropped the whole thing."

As disappointed Representative McClean goes off hopeful of starting some kind of revolution. Representative Fitzmaurice jovially addresses the committee: "Gentlemen, I've always told you you're a bunch of crooks. Some day you will regret it. But personally, I believe that the vast natural resources of public apathy have never even been tapped. It won't come in my lifetime."

Playwright Anderson and Representative McClean's idealistic Secretary add: "Maybe."

A Saturday Night (by Owen Davis; William A. Brady, producer) brings Peggy Wood, who loves her native Brooklyn but has been playing in London for the past four years, back to the U. S. stage. The vehicle is not a strong one, but the story has definite folksy appeal.

Marguerite Langdon (Miss Wood) has been leading a life of quiet desperation for years. To all appearances well off, she and her husband Jim (Hugh O'Connell) have never had all those good times they promised each other. Her birthday, decides Jim, shall be the occasion for turning over a new leaf. The children, Sally and Ted, bring presents. Jim gets tickets for a revue, promises to go dancing afterward. Then Mrs. Langdon has some real trouble. Before she can get out of the house, Ted is brought home with a sprained ankle suffered in a basketball game. Daughter Sally starts for Chicago with a bounder. Husband Jim fails to get the promotion he was sure of. The family's best friend starts making love to Mrs. Langdon.

You will not be very much surprised by Playwright Davis' solution of the Langdons' situation, but Actress Wood's full-blown charm, tinged with a happy trace of quiet amusement at the part she is playing, should please. Hugh O'Connell, the droll one who cracked Indian nuts throughout Once in a Lifetime, demonstrates first-rate ability in a part more serious for him than usual. Forsaking All Others (by Edward Roberts & Frank Cavett; Arch Selwyn, producer). It took four directors, a reformed magician and a heavy-lidded lady who is a Congressman's daughter and a Senator's niece to get this lush comedy in production.

Like Peggy Wood, svelte, sexy Tallulah Bankhead has not been seen on her native boards for some years, although her bony, faintly reptilian face has brooded through several recent Hollywood films. In Forsaking All Others, Miss Bankhead of Alabama is called upon to play the part of a young woman who is about to be married to her childhood sweetheart. Waiting nervously in an anteroom of the church, the bride-to-be exclaims that "she would really rather live in sin'' than go through with the marriage. Unexpectedly she is relieved of the necessity. Her groom jilts her for a dark, rapacious beauty he has met abroad. "Well," sardonically observes Actress Bankhead, "anyhow, Jesus loves me." The indecisive groom forsakes his new wife for his old girl, goes to Mexico with one of his friends (Fred Keating, who used to make birdcages disappear and eat needles while conversing glibly) to get a quick divorce. But this time Actress Bankhead changes her mind, a bit of luck for Magician Keating.

Forsaking All Others has a set, a combination of cosiness and opulence, executed by Donald Oenslager, which may be recorded as the best-looking stage drawing room on Broadway. Miss Bankhead's lazy walk, assured head-tossings and general air of supersophistication are interesting: one understands why London "gallery girls" formed Tallulah Bankhead clubs. Her performance is as smooth and exciting as a planter's punch. You will probably not be able to recall what it was that she and clever Fred Keating said that made you chuckle, but you will remember chuckling.

Run, Little Chillun! (by Hall Johnson; Robert Rockmore, producer). Jim, son and assistant preacher to Pastor Jones of Hope Baptist Church (colored), is drawn from his good wife Ella by the flashing eyes of Sulamai, a loose-hipped young woman from Toomer's Bottom, across the tracks. With Sulamai he attends a meeting of the New Day Pilgrims, a strange sect who worship the moon out in the cypress swamps with four-part harmony and orgiastic dancing. Sulamai seems to have an irresistible appeal for the minor clergy. Writhing in ecstasy among the half-naked New Day Pilgrims, she also distracts the heathen big black Brother Moses from pure contemplation of the moon. Back in Hope Baptist Church, Pastor Jones is conducting a six-day camp meeting to bring his straying lamb back to the fold. Jim sees the error of his ways, returns to Ella. The vicious Sulamai is killed by a bolt of lightning at the church door.

On this ramshackle outline, Choir Leader Hall Johnson has created the finest all-Negro spectacle Manhattan critics can remember, a worthy successor to white Marc Connelly's The Green Pastures in which the Hall Johnson Choir played such a conspicuous part. What Johnson has written is not so much a play as the music & libretto for an opera. His object was to present in dramatic form the background and development of Negro spirituals, to give his chorus of 20 voices a chance to sing his songs.

The slow start of Run, Little Chillun! is quickly forgotten in the orgy of the moon worshippers and the Baptist revival, two scenes as stirring as anything the present season has produced.

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