New Plays in Manhattan

All That Glitters (by John Barag-wanath and Kenneth Simpson; produced by George Abbott). News that George Abbott is directing a play interests Broadway more than who wrote it, or who acts in it. Abbott is noted for discovering merit in scripts rejected by other producers, is able by skilful play-doctoring, casting and directing to whip up a hit out of what looked like nothing.* Nevertheless, Abbott's whiphand some-times falters: his first two shows this season (Angel Island, Brown Sugar) were flops. But last week his third attempt looked as if it might last.

All That Glitters is a waggish yarn about the peccadillos of Manhattan bluebloods and, according to rumor, based on fact. Playboy Muggy Williams swears to nail Mrs. Townsend's hide to his barn door because she insulted his fiancee. He hires a senorita from a Park Avenue brothel to pose as a Spanish countess. Promptly, Mrs. Townsend plans a dinner in her honor, where the countess, according to Muggy's plans will disgrace the dowager with a strip-tease act. The hitch comes when one of Muggy's best friends, three hours before the stripping, announces that he has wed the countess, thus insuring suitable third-act complications.

Most of Abbott's actors have worked for him before, call themselves unofficially the Abbott Acting Company, team together smoothly. Arlene Francis is a countess who could warm any blueblood, and Allyn Joslyn, one of the merry scenarists in Boy Meets Girl, makes the playboy a likable wag in spite of his practical jokes and bowlegged puns. Sample: "A lecher is a man who collects lechings."

". . . one third of a nation" (by Arthur Arent; Living Newspaper, producer). When President Roosevelt in his second inaugural address, January 20, 1937, declared that he found in the U. S. ". . . one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, and ill-nourished," he spoke a resounding mouthful. Last week the Federal Theatre made that echoing phrase the text for the latest edition of its Living Newspaper.* Against a cross-sectional background of a four-story tenement house with crumbling stairways and dank, sunless rooms, the U. S. slum problem is forcefully dramatized. Statistics and editorial comment are dressed up with music, movies, lantern slides. Most of the dialog runs between an omniscient Voice issuing from a loudspeaker and a Little Man who springs out of the audience and wants to know.

Tracing the history of Manhattan's housing problem, the Voice denounces such early settlers as Astor, Wendell, Goelet and Rhinelander, who, the Federal Theatre dramatists fervently proclaim, first grabbed the land and have snugly sat on it ever since. Less through their own foresight than through the industry of the masses, their land increased in value. And the masses got higher rent bills, housing that ran rapidly ramshackle.

Crime, disease and juvenile delinquency are shown spawning in the squalor of "old-law" tenements,* of which 67,000 still exist in Manhattan. The horror of a cholera epidemic which ravaged the slums in the last century is vividly projected. (Today's scourge: tuberculosis.) Two scenes show the panic when fire sweeps through the tenement's rickety hallways.

What's to be done about all this? the Little Man wants to know. Rent strikes are shown. The tenants hope to force the landlords to repair the tenements and lower rents. But since the high price of building materials forces landlords to raise rents, what is the solution? More housing projects, says the Voice.

The Wagner-Steagall Bill for Government housing is declared to be a step in the right direction, but only a small step. At the present rate of progress, says the Little Man gloomily, it will take 200 years for Manhattan's slums to be cleared.

*Room Service and Brother Rat, both produced and directed by Abbott, are in their Second seasons on Broadway.

*Some earlier editions of the Living Newspaper were Power, on the Tennessee Valley project; and Triple-A Plowed Under, on the Agricultural Adjustment Act.

*Erected or existing prior to the Tenement House Law of 1901, which set up standards for future construction, created minimum standards for existing tenements.

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