One Touch of Lardner

Ring and the Wild Belles, Particularly Gilda Gray, Serve to Animate Latest "Ziegfeld Follies"

HEYWOOD BROUN

MR. ZIEGFELD'S new Follies is described by the producer as "The National Institution Glorifying the American Girl;" It seems to us that it serves much more glorify Will Rogers. We find little feminist

propaganda in the Follies this year. No producer has been so frank to recognize the limits of the chorus girl. Her responsibilities are of the slightest. She is called upon to wear many costumes, to be sure, but this task has been tempered to her capacities by the arrangement that she need dress in only a little at a time. As Mr. Rogers has remarked,

" I don't know whether Mr. Ziegfeld is glorifying the American girl, but he's certainly exposing her."

Now and again the members of the chorus are asked to march upstairs and then down aoain and to keep step to music. Generally their service consists of little more than to stand and wait. They do not sing and they dance a little. Indeed, practically all the choral dancing in the present performance has been entrusted to the Tiller Girls, an imported English organization made up of voung women with more training and slighter social responsibilities than the girls of the Ziegfeld organization.

It has long been an American theatrical tradition that audiences of summer-time are interested in nothing except the sight of large numbers of beautiful girls ambling excitedly across a gaily bedizened stage.

We have never had much faith in this belief.

It is our notion that summer is the season for heavy thinking. New York's climate is often such as to drive all fleshly thoughts away and inspire the swelterer to things of the spirit if he would survive. When humidity comes in at the door, carnality flies out of the window.

A Puritan Satirist

AS a matter of fact, in spite of his slogan, Mr. Ziegfeld has obviously provided a show for the thoughtful. He presents, for instance, Mr. Will Rogers one of the most searching American satirists of our day. And Mr. Rogers for all his geniality is a puritan at heart. He moves among the Ziegfeld splendours and ridicules them. He is no more in awe of a lavish ballet than he is of the United States Senate. Indeed, we rather suspect the existence of a Puritan strain some place or other in Ziegfeld himself. He has brought more beauty to the American theatre than any other producer of revues, and perhaps more than any other native producer in any field of dramatic entertainment, and yet there is seldom any particularly effective air of abandon about the proceedings. He has succeeded in proving that bare legs may be austere. There are many moments during a Follies performance in which a deep religious hush descends upon the audience. The sudden realization that nature is wonderful may well provoke the most solemn thoughts.

This season we detect at least one ardent secessionist from the customary reverential attitude of the Follies toward the wonders of the body. Miss Gilda Gray manages to wear beauty without also assuming an air of responsibility. She makes her portion of the hollies a little rowdy and we like it. She is the seismic disturbance in a stately spectacle. She shakes not only her hips but the whole pageant out of a Percy Mackaye mood into something sociable and common.

Ring Lardner, also, helps. Mr. Lardner, as far as we know, does not dance. At any rate he has made no public appearances but he has contributed a baseball sketch called I he Bull Pen which is one of the most human and amusing things in the Follies. Here again a pontoon is thrown across a gulf, so that there may be commerce between life and entertainment. The Bull Pen is a little more than just funny. It is an accurate portrayal of an important phase of American life. We are distinctly aware of the fact that a number of people in anv audience at the hollies will not altogether understand what Joe Webb, the busher of Mr. Lardner's sketch, is talking about. A certain fundamental education is necessary for the complete enjoyment of the little play. One must know that Rogers Hornsby is a player in the National League, and that Ty Cobb is a good batter, and that Sisler is also a commendable performer. Mr. Lardner is well within his rights as an artist, we believe, in defiantly limiting his appeal to the intelligentsia to whom these things are known. He can afford to blaze a trail and wait for the great general public to catch up and appreciate just what he is trying to do.

Due praise should also be bestowed upon Mr. Ziegfeld for making this daring experiment and acting as a missionary to Broadway in the matter of spreading the knowledge of baseball. Contrary to popular belief, baseball is not yet the property of the great masses of America. It is a field of endeavour the true inwardness of which is understood only by little groups here and there. Indeed we believe that there are great stretches of this country in which the inhabitants know more about Dunsany than they do about baseball. A recent test of American high school students revealed the fact that less than fifty per cent of them had ever heard of Babe Ruth.

Many a man who indicates a complete knowledge of the subject by saying, "Ah, yes, Beethoven!" will blink and look bewildered at hearing the name of Grover Cleveland Alexander. However, the inclusion of The Bull Pen into a popular entertainment such as the Follies may mark a preliminary step into taking baseball wholly out of the field of sheer intellect and lifting the public up to a proper appreciation of this diversion of the few.

The Fokine Ballet

ILL ROGERS, absent for several seasons, returns to carry the humanizing process still further. He affords the proper contrast for the most beautiful of the Ziegfeld spectacles. After one is almost surfeited with gazing on unending and unbending pulchritude, an agreeable dissonance is provided by the appearance of Rogers. Just the right spot on the bill has been chosen for him. Immediately preceding Rogers is the Fokine ballet, Frolicking Gods. This is one of the most gorgeous things ever achieved in a Ziegfeld show. It is a ballet without the usual annoying symbolism. It tells a story, but one uncomplicated by the necessity of a dancer standing in the centre of the stage and semaphoring a gamut of emotions. The scene is a museum and into it stray a young man and a woman. Loitering and flirting about the place they manage to get themselves locked in, whereupon the gods from the pedestals come to life and chase them about the premises in wild and merry manner. The ballet really is a frolic just as its name implies. It manages to be beautiful and funny at the same time, which is an essential, but at the same time a difficult, combination of qualities.

However, in spite of the ease and finish of the ballet the spectator cannot quite be induced to forget that this is a premeditated spectacle. He must of necessity know that vast sums have been expended upon it and no end of time. Accordingly, it is thrilling when Will Rogers comes on next armed with nothing but a piece of rope and proceeds to talk as if he were making up things as he goes along. He touches with equal skill upon happenings in the secret rehearsals of the Follies and behind the closed doors of cabinet meetings. He recalls to the audience the fact that he is speaking from the same stage upon which Margot Asquith delivered her first American lecture. "I thought she made a mistake," ventures Rogers, "in talking a whole hour about fox hunting. Why, in that Broadway first night crowd that heard her there wasn't ten per cent of them had ever seen a horse—let alone a fox."

Continued on page 96

Continued from page 35

Curiously enough most of the witticisms of Rogers defy reprinting. Something of the full effect is lost. His rope helps. One is doubly amused when

he hears a joke come hurtling out of the centre of a lasso performing intricate capers. Perhaps Rogers knows the same secret as Fokine. Mr. Ziegfeld's cowboy entertainer is beautiful as well as funny. We don't mean Mr. Rogers personally, to be sure, but he can bend his rope into movement and line of loveliness. It is at some such moment that he loosens his liveliest quip.