The Theatrical Callboard

Critical Notes Before the Curtain Rises

KENNETH MACGOWAN

THERE are those who see a dark plot against the Actors Equity Association in Augustus Thomas's American National Theatre. Thomas is the Will Hays of the Producing Managers' Association. The managers are ready to stand the costs of the venture. Since the actors' trade union, through the Equity Players, have entered the uplift producing field this season, its friends maintain that the producers are doing the same thing in order to curry public favor for the battle over the closed shop which is bound to result when the present contract between stage-capital and stage-labor runs out in 1924. Less interested spectators believe that, at the worst, Thomas is merely caught at a job of spring housecleaning.

The American National Theatre would amount to very little if it meant no more than the appearance of Marjorie Rambeau in an efficient production of As You Like It. The fact that it happens to be financed by the employers' association, which includes Arthur Hopkins, instead of by Arthur Hopkins, hardly turns it into an art theatre expressive of the American people. But Thomas' scheme goes further than that. ;ls YOU Like It will not be content with a long run on Broadway and a tour of as many of the larger cities as still have audiences left for Shakespeare. Thomas purposes routing As You Like It into every town with anything left that looks like a stage. This Shakespearean production will visit cities whose public has turned, disillusioned, from the theatres, and whose playhouses look to Hollywood instead of Broadway for sustenance. This As You Like It is intended to do something to win back The Road—that vast and fallen empire of Charles Frohman and Klaw & Erlanger.

Uplifting the Little Theatres

ONE aspect of this production of As You Like It goes outside the commercial calculations of the managers and points to the larger and more hopeful purposes of the American National Theatre. Thomas is a dab at diction; if he could manage it, he would probably put a department on What the Well-Dressed Man Will Say into every theatre program. This As You Like It is to be well-spoken, and it is to be exhibited to the yokelry of Oklahomer, Bahston, and Mizzoura. It is also to be shown to the amateur actors of those places. More than that, the "little theatres" are to be asked to send their stage directors to New York to hear good English on the stage, and then they are to be given permission to produce at home each year at least one Broadway success which their directors have inspected. The playwriting and producing courses of the universities are to be linked up with the general scheme by scholarships for local actors, writers, and directors.

There is promise in this plan. So much promise, in fact, that already one or two of the foundations, which ordinarily ignore the theatre as an instrument of art and education, are offering cooperation. Thomas's ultimate success will depend to some extent on his discovery that many of the little theatres can teach more to Broadway than Broadway can teach to them, and that men under fifty may have something to contribute to the wisdom of the board of directors which manages the American National Theatre.

Deems Taylor—Melo-Monopolist

FOR a number of seasons "the cleverest man in town" kicked about New York intermittently looking for something better than oleomargerine for his bread. But, since his cleverness ran to music, carpentry, and tea table wit, even the margerine had to be spread pretty thin. Suddenly now—such things always happen this way— Deems Taylor finds himself the justly popular musical critic of the New York World, a composer for the Philharmonic and the New York Symphony Orchestras, and a monopolist of the incidental music in Broadway productions. Taylor began his theatrical activities two season ago with A Man About Town, Austin Strong's pantomime, which went from the Comedy Club to the Ritz Theatre to join Mary Stuart. Then he arranged and wrote music for Liliotn, and got together the incidental noise which accompanied the recital of the motion picture scenario in Dulcy. This year Taylor has written old English songs for Will Shakespeare, incidental music for the Theatre Guild's production of The Adding Machine, and a musical setting for Alan Seeger's I Have a Rendezvous with Death in Humoresque. But perhaps his master-stroke in this curious field of effort was writing the original compositions of the hero in the failure Rita Coventry. The work of young musical geniuses heard on the stage is generally on a level with the painting done by our leading stars. In Rita Coventry, however, the gifted young piano tuner sat down and played a few little things of his own which lived up to what the ecstatic prima donna said of them before she married him.

Every little while the glory and passion of Italy and the Renaissance sweep into our theatre and overwhelm our everyday dramas and everyday audiences. The Jest, Monna Vanna, and The Love of the Three Kings leap from the past to set the stage for the new opera Mona Lisa, the popular sensation of the Metropolitan's season, and Mercedes de Acosta's Sandro Botticelli, in which Eva Le Gallienne and Basil Sydney appear at the Provincetown Theatre. Sandro Botticelli is kin to Monna Vanna in one respect. It uses the same device of sending a beautiful woman to a man's apartment clad only in a cloak. In the present case, however, the woman is Simonetta, noted for her coldness as well as her beauty, the man is the famous painter of Florence, and the outcome—much to the lady's chagrin—is nothing more than the painting of The Birth of Venus, which now hangs in the Uffizi gallery. Miss de Acosta has imagined this story as the prelude to the funeral of Simonetta which Maurice Hewlett pictured in his Quattrocentisteria, and which Ben Ali Haggin has reproduced in living pictures for the vaudeville houses.

April Productions

AMONG the new productions of April are the long-awaited arrival of Mrs. Fiske in The Dice of the Gods, a play on dope by Lillian Barrett which H. H. Frazee is mounting; The Enchanted Cottage, Sir Arthur Wing Pinero's one fantastic play, a drama of love's transforming power, in which William A. Brady present Katharine Cornell and Gilbert Emery; and Sold, Porter Emerson Browne's drama for Carlotta Monterey.