New Plays in Manhattan

Petticoat Fever (by Mark Reed; Alfred de Liagre Jr. & Richard Aldrich, producers) starts its merry nonsense when a rising curtain discloses handsome silver-voiced Dennis King (Richard of Bordeaux) lying on a couch in a Labrador radio station talking to his Eskimo handyman (Chinese Peter Goo Chong). Actor King impersonates Dascom Dinsmore, an errant remittance man, who has not seen a pretty woman in the two years he has been in Labrador. He is irritably contemplating the rigors of another long winter without female society when his shanty suddenly takes on the atmosphere of a Long Island week-end house party.

An airplane accident suddenly introduces a bumbling nobleman and his pretty fiancee. The Eskimo handyman, worried about his boss's sex life, has meantime imported two native women from a distant mission. Then a sealer arrives with the young woman who jilted Dascom Dinsmore two years before. Broad as a snowshoe, the farce finally soars off into fantasy with a big double wedding. First-week audiences clapped their delight at Dennis King's fresh talent for comedy, were likewise appreciative when he took time out to sing a song in his best light opera manner.

De Luxe (by Louis Bromfield & John Gearon; Chester Erskin producer) is the kind of play which is so embarrassingly bad that it makes a playgoer's flesh crawl. Billed as "a play about the end of an epoch," it presents a frieze of specious, spotty and purportedly War-wrecked characters against a recent Armistice Day celebration in Paris. Rarely encountered outside the pages of bogus novels, these gloomy folk go about telling each other that they are "so tired," complaining of "the jitters," wishing they were dead. Once in a while one encourages another to "buck up," but for the most part pessimism is the order of the day. A female member of the British aristocracy who has been living with an insane exiled Grand Duke actually manages to blow her brains out. The rest, gigolos, rich nymphomaniacs, Fascist financiers, drunks, drift on toward perdition, a fate from which at the last moment a clean young U. S. newspaperman manages to save a clean young U. S. millionairess. De Luxe was first announced several years ago for production by the Provincetown Theatre as the sole work of Louis Bromfield who has lately been making a desperate assault on the U. S. Theatre. His Times Have Changed, an adaptation from the French, is currently struggling on Broadway. Promised soon is another collaboration, Here Today, Gone Tomorrow. Unhappily, stage-struck Mr. Bromfield's popular success as a novelist (Twenty-Four Hours; The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg) does not seem to have fitted him for his new calling.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.