New Plays in Manhattan

Ziegfeld Follies (presented by Mrs. Florenz ["Billie Burke"] Ziegfeld; staged by Bobby Connolly and John Murray Anderson; settings by Watson Barratt and Albert R. Johnson; songs by Billy Rose, Vernon Duke, Samuel Pokrass and Dana Suesse). Florenz Ziegfeld spent only $13,000 on his first Follies in 1907. Critic Percy Hammond called it a "loud and leering orgy of indelicacy and suggestiveness." A huge success, it began a tradition for gorgeous extravaganzas. Every year, with a mounting disdain of money, Ziegfeld put on a new edition of his Follies. After 1910 all but one opened in Manhattan's New Amsterdam Theatre in mid-June, usually played to out-of-town visitors until the following spring. Ziegfeld called the 1927 edition his last, spent $300,000 to mount it. It ran for 60 weeks. In 1931 he put on his positively last Follies at his own Ziegfeld Theatre. In July 1932 the old grandee died in Hollywood. Last summer Broadway's two great salvage men, Lee and J. J. Shubert, contracted for the great name "Ziegfeld Follies" from Billie Burke Ziegfeld. They immediately set about giving their name a show. Knowing the Shuberts' famed pinchbeck failings, Mrs. Ziegfeld began by passing on director, cast, sets and costumes. Since she was acting in Hollywood in Universal's Only Yesterday, names and sketches were submitted to her by mail, telephone and telegraph. After a false start on the road and the addition of $50,000 worth of scenery and costumes, the Shuberts wrung their hands and announced "a new policy of hiring the best talent, like Florenz Ziegfeld himself." When the 1934 Ziegfeld Follies opened last week in Manhattan, the Shuberts' name was not on the program. But it was not needed, for the opening occurred not at the New Amsterdam or the Ziegfeld, but at the Shuberts' own Winter Garden where for 13 winters they used to put on their tinselly Passing Shows.

John Murray Anderson's Ziegfeld Follies is fast and funny. It remembers Ziegfeld only in title and opulent manner. It has magnificent sets: Fifth Avenue from a bustop, a store window, a huge smear of prairie with phantom cowboys and dogies.* It has Fanny Brice and little, shrugging Willie Howard with his brother Eugene, comedians of, by and for Broadway. It has beauteous Jane Froman and commanding Everett Marshall to sing. It has a pair of Astaire-like dancers in Vilma and Buddy Ebsen. It has an incredible acrobatic child named June Preisser. It has good songs: "Suddenly," "Moon About Town," "I Like the Likes of You" and "To the Beat of the Heart." It has flocks of pretty, nimble girls, twittering in and out, nearly lost behind beautiful costumes. And, above all, on opening night it had in the audience Critic Hammond to announce that it ". . . breaks all known records for public obscenity."

Comedy is the keynote of the 1934 Follies. As a New York Mayor in the reviewing stand, Willie Howard notes the absence of photographers ("Is Eleanor Roosevelt in town?"), the Republican delegation ("Where is he?"), the marching bankers with "angina Pecora." But the show belongs mostly to Miss Brice. Older and heavier, she uses her kangaroo lollop and wry mouth as trademarks for a great human personality. All her songs are written by her third husband, Billy Rose. In a pinafore she repeats her radio performance of "Snooks," the problem child of a George Washington descendant who tries to cure her of lying. Depraved, whining, fearful, she pushes out a great idiot face when she is cornered in a lie and baby-talks: "What did 'oo say?" When her mother finally admits to her father that before the strange child was born, Baron Munchausen had chased her across a field, Fanny pipes up: "I think he caught 'oo, mummy." As a Russian grand duchess stranded in Manhattan, she hypocritically laments: The Princess Dubinsky, Without her Kolinski, Is showing her skinski In a burlesque by Minsky.

Hipping back & forth, letting her shoulder straps fall, she does a monstrously coy "stripteaser routine." She hits Evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson with a rowdy song: "I'm Salvation Sadie from Avenue A, Vending salvation and making it pay," rolling her eyes with a huge suggestiveness that is wholly antiseptic.

Days Without End (by Eugene O'Neill; produced by the Theatre Guild). There is something extraordinary about every Eugene O'Neill play. In this one it is a ferocious mannikin with unbrushed hair, a flat, angry voice and a perpetual frown. He (Stanley Ridges) is the personification of the lower self that belongs to the hero, John Loving (Earle Larimore), visible to the audience whenever Loving is on the stage but never to the other people in the play. In the first act, Loving and his gloomy shadow are to be seen seated, like the riders of a tandem bicycle, at the desk where Loving is thinking about writing an autobiographical novel. They have different notions as to how the book should end. When Loving & Co. go home for dinner, the reason for their dual presence is partially explained. John Loving married his wife (Selena Royle) when, distraught by the deaths of both his parents, he had lost his faith in God. Now he has begun to lose his faith in his own love for his wife because one of her friends (Ilka Chase) has seduced him. When John Loving starts to tell the story of his projected novel to Elsa Loving and his uncle, Father Baird (Robert Loraine), his lower nature proposes a bitter conclusion, in which the hero's wife dies of pneumonia. Elsa Loving, quick at deductions, goes for a walk in the rain but when she catches pneumonia she does not die. Playwright O'Neill calls Days Without End a "modern miracle play." The last act shows John Loving and his second self praying beneath a crucifix. That John Loving has conquered his macabre demon can be seen from the fact that Actor Stanley Ridges is groveling on the floor. In Days Without End, Playwright O'Neill makes a solemn, dramatic and excitingly ambitious effort to suggest that, for the problem of human duality--which he represented with masks in The Great God Brown, wraiths in Emperor Jones and asides in Strange Interlude--Christianity is still an adequate solution. Theatre Guild audiences who liked Ah Wilderness are likely to find O'Neill's second contribution to the current season as provoking, more pretentious, less alive.

A Divine Moment (by Robert Hare Powel; produced by Peggy Fears Blumenthal). A patrician old spinster (Charlotte Granville) lies in her Newport, R. I. house where the lamps are still filled with whale oil, the bathtubs are tin, the portraits 150 years old. She is briskly sentimental with an octogenarian admiral (William Ingersoll) who has thoughtfully dissembled his love for 60 years, tries to persuade her young nephew (Tom Douglas) to give up his Wall Street career and live with her. He promises to show his fiancee when he finds a girl who does not mispronounce Rockefeller. With these gentle snobbish strokes, the stage is set for the introduction of the nephew's girl (Peggy Fears). He meets her at a vulgar tycoon's party next door, does not know that she is married. Wandering into the second act set, a superb garden with two great oaks and gardenia roses, Miss Fears falls in love with garden, house, young man. When she pronounces Rockefeller correctly he straightway takes her to his aunt who approves, and dies happily. The girl explains that she is married, that her coarse husband has been kind in his way. As she goes back to the party next door and her husband, the young socialite is left in the dark with the body of his aunt and the whale oil lamps.

Big Hearted Herbert (by Sophie Kerr and Anna Steese Richardson; Eddie Dowling, producer). "I never saw a college man who was worth his salt," says Herbert Kalness (J. C. Nugent), a plump, mean, small-town manufacturer who also has a low opinion of evening clothes, servants and most of the amenities. When the play opens, he seems much less devoted to his charming family than to two pieces of bric-a-brac in the living room: a hideous crayon portrait of his day-laborer father and an oversized spittoon. The little comedy, which Song-&-Danceman Eddie Dowling chose for his first Broadway presentation in three years, shows how certain trivial experiences improve the character of Herbert Kalness. When the patrician parents of his daughter's Harvard fiance dine at his house, his boorish conduct disgraces his family. He sneers openly at good breeding, abuses his visitors because, unlike himself, they failed to blossom from the gutter. The next night the tables are turned. When Big Hearted Herbert brings his best customer & wife to dine pretty Mrs. Kalness (Elisabeth Risclon ) is in a kitchen apron, dishing out an Irish stew. Her husband is "a plain man,'' she proudly says, and invites her guests to "set." Big Hearted Herbert is an obvious, unimportant, moderately amusing three-act caricature in which J. C. Nugent, father of Cinema-Director Elliot Nugent, turns himself into the spitting image of the type of character that Cartoonist W. E. Hill draws in Among Us Mortals. Actor Nugent gets the best laugh in the play by the simple device of holding his breath. This causes him to grow red with apoplectic indignation in the third act when his wife tells his dinner guests, as he told hers the night before, about his humble origin.

*In front of which is sung "The Last Round-Up," written two years ago by Billy Hill and sold last summer to the Follies. The song beat the Follies to Broadway and popularity by months (TIME, Oct. 23).

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