New Plays in Manhattan

George White's Scandals has been confected this year upon the principle that a couple of second-hand ideas are worth a single original one. In line with this idea, Lyricist Jack Yellen has taken equal parts of Ted Koehler's Truckin' and Irving Berlin's Top Hat, White Tie and Tails, given them a shaking and poured off something called Truckin' In My Tails. The rest of the twelfth production of George White's periodical durbar largely owes its origin to old burlesque acts, old vaudeville turns, old smoking-room stories. Nevertheless, many an item in this tried & true form of entertainment will please those theatre-goers to whom Broadway is a desert waste without a girl show:

Item: 50 ladies of the ensemble, any one of whom most male spectators would like to know better.

Item: Bert Lahr, expectorating his words and making hideous faces.

Item: sad little Willie Howard trying to look down a contralto's bosom while his brother Eugene and a second woman sing Rigoletto.

Item: Rudy Vallee.

High point of the performance: three Negroes called Sam, Ted and Ray, two of whom wear neat Ethiopian regimentals, while the third affects the sun helmet, black cape, gold-braided tunic and umbrella of Man-of-the-Year Haile Selassie, clogging for dear life atop a small dais (see p. 13).

Low point of the performance: shrill Gracie Barrie singing I've Got To Get Hot, a ballad about a choir singer turned crooner which includes the following tristich: I've squelched my ideals, Now I belch at my meals-- I had to get hot.

Genealogy counts for little on Broadway, but nobody in show business can point to humbler origins than George Alviel White. He says he has been on his own since he was 5. Successively a stable boy, jockey, shoe-shiner, military mascot, newsboy, bellhop, he was delivering telegrams for Postal when some extempore dance steps in a Bowery saloon earned him $12. At that point he quit the telegraph company's employ but retained its uniform, dancing in it for throw money in saloons. On one occasion Clarence Mackay's future son-in-law, a waiter named Israel Baline, tossed '"Swifty" White into the street for making a nuisance of himself.

Vaudeville dancing led George White into producing tabloid revues. In 1919, with dark and lovely Dancer Ann Pennington for his star, White put on his first Scandals. Successive reincarnations have produced such national dance steps as the Charleston (1926) and Black Bottom (1927), such tunes as The Birth of the Blues (1926) and That's Why Darkies Were Born (1931).

An inveterate gambler, George White is supposed to have made and lost large wads of money in his time. At 43 his chief idiosyncrasies are his hair, which he keeps scrupulously greased, his neckwear, which is always black, and his mastication, which is interminable. A wholesale dealer in female good looks, he has never married. "I'm independent and nobody can keep tab on what I do," says he. "I like it. And with any luck I'll beat this marriage rap to the end."

Hell Freezes Over (by John Patrick; George Kondolf, producer). Twenty-five explorers set out in the dirigible White Hope to fly across Antarctica. The White Hope crashes on the Polar Plateau, and then there are seven. The survivors decide to take a chance on the 200-mile trek to the ice barrier. Before they can get out of the dirigible a girder falls on the rich boy whom the doctor subsequently puts out of his pain, and then there are six. The survivors choose the Swede cook and the New York hoodlum from among their number to make a dash for the barrier. They fall into a crevasse before they get a mile from the wrecked ship, and then there are four. The survivors settle down on short rations to fight out the winter night. The doctor runs out of morphine, shoots himself, and then there are three. The survivors try to keep up their spirits with tales of their past lives. The radio operator thinks the aviator has admitted seducing his wife, so he chains up the old dog sled driver to keep him out of the way, shoots the aviator, gets shot himself and then there is one. That survivor, the noble old companion of Scott and Amundsen, hears rescue signals but cannot unshackle himself to answer them, resolves to face his horrible death as a brave man should.

All that is left when the final curtain falls on Hell Freezes Over is the harrowing memory of a crackerjack Guignol melodrama, performed in virile fashion by an all-male cast.

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