New Plays in Manhattan

Jumbo (words & music by Ben Hecht & Charles MacArthur, Richard Rodgers & Lorenz Hart; Billy Rose, producer). Having announced the opening of his show every week since Labor Day, having postponed it ten consecutive times until at last he bought space in the newspapers to plead: "I'll be a dirty name if I'll open Jumbo until it's ready," last week minuscule Billy Rose finally presented in Manhattan's Hippodrome the spectacle that was supposed to be BIGGER THAN A SHOW, BETTER THAN A CIRCUS. First-nighters were provided with a scale by which to judge the production as soon as they got their tickets, which were precisely nine times the normal size. When they took their seats in what is still the world's fourth largest theatre,* they received further premonition of the grandeur that was to come. But when the cylindrical curtain around the protruding ring-stage at last rose, result could only be described by a word from the lexicon of Jumbo's chief comic. Jimmy Durante: "Colossial!"

Outstripped for sheer bulk only by cinema extravaganza or the Big Top itself, Jumbo is a megalomaniac medley of musicomedy and circus, with the circus gaining a shade the advantage. In point of fact, however, Producer Rose was presenting a show not intrinsically different from the sort of production which made the old Hippodrome world-famed. What justified Jumbo's extravagant ballyhoo was the fact that Mr. Rose has added all the mechanical and artistic improvements which the U. S. Theatre has evolved in the 15 years since the old Hippodrome ceased to function. Where the old Hippodrome shows provided such mellow music as Poor Butterfly, Mr. Rose's Jumbo was packed with more sophisticated tunes by Rodgers & Hart. Where the old Hippodrome shows raised spectators' hair with a troupe of girls who descended into a pool never to come up again, Mr. Rose exhibited his silvered and spangled idea of what a circus might look like in a child's dream. Both the old and the new Hippodrome spectacles were pervaded with the smell of elephants, were filled to the brim with good clean entertainment, were calculated to appeal to the rich & poor with a $3 top and a 40-c- bottom, were bound to please both young & old.

The young should like Jumbo for:

A trickster who instantly changes costume a dozen times, plays a collapsible fiddle and an expanding guitar, withdraws at least 150 fake bananas from his capacious pockets.

A white horse named Doheos who claps his hoofs.

A couple who balance on a plank on a log over an open cage of roaring lions.

Adults should enjoy:

Gloria Grafton singing a weird and hypnotic little song called Little Girl Blue, Donald Novis singing a charming number called My Romance.

Half a dozen fine big show girls ("dream women" to Mr. Rose) mounted on horseback and wearing the world's lowest decolletage.

Jimmy Durante, the man with no inhibitions, who is constantly searching among Jumbo's scores of females to find one who is not "face-crazy." Mr. Durante's big moment comes when he leads out the show's one elephant, points to the pachyderm's snout and then to his own, exclaims, "Me and him's related!" then suddenly finds that his relative has rolled over on him.

Parnell (by Elsie Schauffler; Smith & Ayer, producers). The Irish say that the squalls of rain and bursts of sunshine which chase each other across their nation's sky all day long are like the Irish people, quick to laugh and quick to cry. No less contradictory and mercurial are Ireland's heroes, few of whom seem wholly heroic to any save the Irish. Among the latter-day saints of the Emerald Isle, Charles Stewart Parnell, for all his fine granite monument in Dublin's Parnell Square, was during his lifetime not even a hero to all the Irish. In plain history he was a tall, sickly, inarticulate man of British and U. S. parentage who went to the British Parliament from Wicklow in 1875. There, after five years, he became so adept at cloakroom strategy that he replaced the nominal leader of the 59 Irish members, identified himself with Irish nationalism at home and abroad, was hailed on a trip to Canada as "the uncrowned King of Ireland." In 1890 Parnell was pressing the old fox Gladstone very close for Irish Home Rule when, to the horror of the English-speaking Victorian world, it was suddenly found that for years Hero Parnell had been living with the wife of one of his lieutenants. Less than a year later, Parnell had married the lady and died, cast out by his party. Home Rule was retarded nearly two generations.

The late Elsie Schauffler, who died just as her play was going into rehearsal, got the not surprising idea that Parnell's biography, even stripped of its big names and historical associations, would make a rattling good love story. And so it does, although Playwright Schauffler was at pains to make her tale historically accurate. In Parnell the play, adulterous Katharine O'Shea, as impersonated by Margaret Rawlings (a lady with the soft walk and abundant voice of Katharine Cornell), is probably a considerably finer figure of a woman than the unhappy Katie of real life who bore six children, three out of wedlock to Hero Parnell, and died in 1921 still despised by her countrymen. Again, there is no historical proof that Captain O'Shea was the wittol and Gladstonian stool pigeon Playwright Schauffler shows.

But if Mrs. Schauffler erred on the side of dramatic imagination in some instances, Director Guthrie McClintic went the whole literal hog when he picked Actor George Curzon to impersonate Parnell. The Washington Naval Treaty of 1922 sent Lieutenant Commander George Curzon, R.N., ashore without a job. Trained in one of the most accurate of professions, Actor Curzon has chosen to give a facsimile reproduction of Parnell in all his bandy-legged, shifty-eyed, hypochondriacal sanctimoniousness. Result is that after the first act. one begins to wonder how he could awaken in handsome Mrs. O'Shea such a roiling passion. It is this unhappy shortcoming that probably will give Parnell only eight pins out of the dramatic ten-strike it deserves.

*First three, in order of size: Manhattan's Music Hall, Roxy, Capitol.

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