New Play in Manhattan

Parade (words & music by Paul Peters, George Sklar & Jerome Moross; Theatre Guild, producer) is an experiment which demonstrates some of the possibilities and all of the shortcomings of presenting songs and dances on a soapbox. Originally this "satirical revue" was scheduled for the rampant Red Theatre Union, which last year put on Messrs. Peters' & Sklar's Communist melodrama Stevedore (TIME, April 20, 1934). In that locale, Parade's sour skits and migraine melodies might have had some relevancy. At the Theatre Guild, which has a tradition for art rather than garment-loft politics, Parade gives its spectators no pleasure, no precept, but plenty of punishment. Its successive theatrical floats savor unhappily of Union Square, seem as homemade and impotently angry as the bedraggled banners of striking bushelmen.

No single item of Parade's bill lacks a heavy-handed social implication, but some interest more than others. Examples:

P: A sketch in which a loyal family on relief cheerfully dresses in newspapers, eats a table top, sympathizes with the "starving Russians."

P: A sketch in which a Jeeter Lesterish farmer suffers an AAA "professor" to destroy his wheat and cotton but shoots the professor when the latter wants to kill his mule.

P: A song number called "Dancing In Central Park," in which a standard romantic lyric is tagged with the extraneous line: "Tomorrow is the fear in my heart."

P: A song called "Life Could Be So Beautiful" ("There's more than enough for all") which is bewilderingly illustrated by some female dancers in ball gowns, some male dancers in curious green corduroy suits.

P: High point for ineptitude: a Mississippi Negro woman plaintively singing a "Letter to the President" in which she reminds him that before the elections she, as a sharecropper, was promised many good things, including "a barrel of applejack."

Those who make the theatre a business instead of a political arena were not surprised that Parade's three distinct assets--a dancer, a designer, a comedian--were old hands from Broadway and not Union Square. Spry, mad-eyed little Esther Junger (Life Begins at 8:40), clad in bold costumes by Constance Ripley, appeals to other senses than that of social injustice when she performs wildly in the Cuban sugar cane. And shy little Jimmy Savo is most capable not when he is being beset by police, or starving in the street, or dying of appendicitis in a neglectful free clinic, but when he is up against his old comic difficulty of making a complicated and terrifying piece of machinery work. As the proprietor of a "puffle" works whose employes are on strike, Funnyman Savo becomes entangled in a ten-foot blue print, has first powder and then oil squirted into his surprised face, nearly electrocutes himself before the whole contraption collapses. Audiences found all this a long way from Karl Marx, were appropriately grateful.

The process by which Jimmy Savo, son of a Bronx cobbler, worked his way into the world's most impressive theatrical organization was long and disjointed. Twenty years ago he was a burlesque bum. Before that he had been an amateur in direct competition with Joe Cook, Eddie Cantor, George Jessel, Fanny Brice on Manhattan's lower East Side. In fact, these striplings once refused to appear in an amateur show with Savo because he was so small and forlorn that the audience always applauded him the prize out of pure pity.

Eleven years ago Savo's baggy clothes and shuffling gait began to be seen in such revues as Ritz Revue, Almanac, Earl Carroll's Vanities. Then five years ago Jimmy Savo dropped out of sight. Suddenly last year he popped up again. Almost every month his squinty eyes, bangs and button nose could be found in some glossy smart-chart because Ben Hecht & Charles MacArthur were featuring him in a much-publicized cinema--which has yet to be released. That was the signal for Manhattan literati and humorists to "discover" in Jimmy Savo a new Charlie Chaplin. Even if, as critics unanimously predicted, Parade proves to be theatrical medicine too bitter for bourgeois taste, Jimmy Savo will have the satisfaction of having appeared under the august auspices of the Guild, whose portals have been passed by only one (George M. Cohan) erstwhile song & dance man before.

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