Theatrical check list

George Jean Nathan

• MARY OF SCOTLAND (ALVIN)—Helen Hayes and Philip Merivale manage, despite interruptions by Helen Menken, to please audiences in an apocryphal but sometimes suavely written blank verse play dealing with the celebrated lady of the title.

• THE SHINING HOUR (BOOTH) A first-rate acting company, including Gladys Cooper, Raymond Massey and Adrianne Allen, adroitly lends to a generally second-rate play by Keith Winter the impression that it is blessed with meaty quality.

• NO MORE LADIES (MOROSCO) — One of the characters is the old grandmother who rocks them in their seats by saying "God damn" when she drops her ball of yarn and who orders a large highball when the younger generation asks for ginger-ale. Some of the lines, too, are out of the 1902 bound volume of Puck. But in between there are some fresh and diverting comedy stretches.

• THE GREEN BAY TREE (CORT) A very well written and pretty consistently interesting study of an elderly pervert and his influence over a young man. The play has been edited in one or two particulars, lest tender American audiences suffer moral qualms, yet it remains one of the best of the more recent London importations. James Dale's performance as the degenerate Dulcimer is capital.

• SHE LOVES ME NOT (46TH ST.) —A loony farce about some Princeton boys who smuggle a chorus girl into their dormitory and thereby upset the equilibrium of the whole United States. It has its share of amusement.

• AH, WILDERNESS! (GUILD)— George M. Cohan, that actor of actors, in a humorously glowing reverie of boyhood in the early nineteen hundreds. If it ever goes on the road with Cohan still in it, they'll probably have to take sticks eventually to kill it.

• SAILOR, BEWARE I (LYCEUM) — A sexually irrepressible sailor encounters, in a Canal Zone honky-tonk, a virgin. From this mythological premise there proceeds a farce which, despite a number of arid spots, has some laughs in it.

• BY YOUR LEAVE (BARRYMORE) — A little middle-aged suburban husband bargains with his wife for a week of freedom in which to "see life". He gets the week but doesn't see it, the while his wife quietly sees it in bed with a handsome stranger. Commonplace and humorless stuff, except for one scene showing the adventures of the husband with an intellectual trollop.

• AS THOUSANDS CHEER (MUSIC BOX) — The year's wittiest and best revue—as tasty, in fact, as any the local theatre has offered —with Clifton Webb, Marilyn Miller, Helen Broderick and Leslie Adams hereby awarded Mrs. Pulitzer's prizes for outstanding revue proficiency.

• THE WIND AND THE RAIN (RITZ) — Frank Lawton, the best juvenile actor on the Anglo-American stage, in a small but agreeable comedy detailing a young medical student's life and loves.

• RICHARD OF BORDEAUX (EMPIRE) — "Gordon Daviot's" admirably written chronicle of the son of the Black Prince, very ably acted by Dennis King. In all respects the finest play of the current season.

• ALL THE KING'S HORSES (IMPERIAL) —The musical comedy about the king and commoner who change places. Johann Strauss, Emmerich Kalmann, Franz Lehar and Victor Herbert, working in combination, might conceivably have musicalized the old whangdoodle into some life, but our Mr. Edward Horan leaves it just where he found it. A dismal evening.

• ZIEGFELD FOLLIES (WINTER GARDEN) — Fannie Brice's comedy and Everett Marshall's singing are the most commendable features of a show that lacks the loveliness of the late Florenz Ziegfeld's touch but that marks a step forward in the Messrs. Shubert's Winter Garden exploits.