The theatre

GEORGE JEAN NATHAN

■ STANZA I.— Confronted by the copious problem of reviewing plays that have been opening during the past month at very nearly a nightly rate, I requested the editor to give over to me for the purpose the entire issue of this magazine, including the advertising section and the back cover. Since he has declined (editors are sometimes very peculiar that way), I shall have to do the best I can with the limited space at my command, and ask your sympathy, indulgence, and maybe even flaming indignation.

A number of productions worthy of extended treatment have appeared upon the boards. The Lunt-Fontanne Taming of the Shrew is one of them, for the Lunt-Fontanne twain are to the Guild Theatre's stage u hat turpentine was to the mule of anecdote. Now again, after a brief stray into other pastures, they have brought into the Guild Theatre catacomb their own vastly inspiriting brand of merry life, this time in the shape of the Shakespearean comedy directed and played much in the key of Fred Karno's A Night in an English Music Hall or the back room at Jack and Charlie's. With a very proper respect for the Bard— despite the opposite conviction of a few remaining critics who seem somehow to believe that Shakespeare composed his buffoonery as a companion piece to King Lear —they have hired Harry WagstafT Cribble to stage it as he staged his own mad March Hares and have filled it with such an appropriate wealth of miscellaneous slapstick, dish throwing and boots in hindparts as must make the Messrs. Mack Sennett, Hal Roach and Laurel and Hardy, those eminent Hollywood pie artists, blush for their own inadequacy.

It is, in a word, a gay and soundly composed presentation, although hardly so original in conception as some of its admirers —together, apparently, with Mr. Lunt and Miss Fontanne themselves—would seem to imagine. The employment of the Christopher Sly induction, for example, which is hinted in the playbill to be quite a novelty, is as old as the local theatrical hills, having been used by Augustin Daly in the Ada Rehan production so long ago as I887 and having been frequently shown since in presentations both by professionals and amateur organizations in various parts of the country. Also—this is parenthetical—there is a whimsical touch of another species of tradition in the present Petruchio's stereotyped fear of articulating clearly the over-saucy line relating to his tongue, and his nervous slurring of it. And now and again there is a suggestion of self-consciousness on thepart of the players that what they are doing is too amusing for words, with the consequent inevitable inducing of a consciousness in the audience that it isn't quite that. But on the whole this Shrew is a juicy relief from the Shrews we more often get, and it brings to the local Shakespearean stage, with Lunt's wholly admirable performance of the illustrious wife-walloper, a fresh bounce and spicy bouquet.

There seem to be two favorite ways to approach Shakespeare. One is to depart from theatrical tradition so greatly that lie becomes indistinguishable from Percy Mackaye turned Harry Thaw, and the other to be so professorially cuddling to him that all the life is squeezed out of him. The LuntFontanne combination has happily followed neither principle and has hence managed a very successful job. Mr. Philip Merivale, on the other hand, in his demised productions of Othello and Macbeth made up the Bard to look like Walter Hampden's grandfather and so bewhiskered the presentations with the false crepe of certain bygone actormanagers' interpretations that the enterprises enjoyed all the oxygenic air of an old trunk. Mr. Merivale's obedience to the texts was right and proper enough, but the obedience was that of a submissive slave rather than of a valiant soldier, and the result was the usual result of unimaginative humility and timorous acquiescence.

Mr. Merivale, who has proved himself a valuable actor in other departments ol drama, further dismayed his old customers with an articulation perhaps more exactly suited to the above-mentioned Christopher Sly or to Trinculo, Stephano, Sir Toby or some other such Shakespearean tosspot than to the general of the Scots king's army or the Moorish general in Venetian service. His utterance was groggy, confused and often downright unintelligible. His support, in addition, was of the flimsiest Shakespearean cardboard, its weakness all the more noticeable in Othello, with the Iago of Kenneth MacKenna the kind of performance that an overjoyed Major Bowes would promptly have given an audition to for his radio hour, with Kenneth Hunter's Cassio a droll stranger to the Shakespearean intention, and with Miss Gladys Cooper's Desdemona stepped directly out of a St. James's Theatre drawing-room exhibit.

■ STANZA II.—It is, with the production of Winterset, still a matter of doubt to me if Maxwell Anderson has entirely made up his own mind whether he wishes to address his plays to literary critics or to drama critics. In the case of this, his latest play, the two stools are again in evidence, with the literary critics sitting much prettier than the drama critics. More than ever with Winterset I find myself thinking back to I9I I or thereabout and, to the first time I heard of Anderson. Louis Sherwin. at the time drama critic for the since deceased Globe, came one morning into the office of the old Smart Set magazine, of which I was co-editor, and told me that there was a first-rate editorial writer on the paper who was writing, on the side and in addition, some very good verse. Sherwin suggested that I get in touch with him and ask to see some of the verse. I did, found it good, as Sherwin had, and published some of it. I also began reading the fellow's editorials on such topics as politics, justice, etc., and likewise found them good. That combination talented newspaper editorial writer and poet was Maxwell Anderson and it is my conviction that the present-day dramatist Maxwell Anderson remains, after these many years, still part editorial writer and part poet and that the two are not as yet either properly differentiated or convincingly synchronized and orchestrated.

In Winterset, accordingly, we have a dim and often vacillating pendulum swinging uncertainly now toward the forthright melodrama of a son seeking to avenge the murder of a SaccoA anzetli fattier and then toward a semi-mystical, quasi-philosophical blank verse. Maeterlinck tries to dance with Gorky and trips over another couple composed of the late Paul Armstrong and Zoo Akins, all falling embarrassingly to the floor. There is no definitely digested plan, no sharp and true direction. Some of the play momentarily touches the hem of beauty and then immediately and awkwardly steps on the skirl and rips it oil.

The favorable stage impression that the exhibit has made in many quarters is perhaps due in large part to the uneommonh fine scenic embellishment which Mr. Mielziner has given it—the dark, towering bridge set is one of the best I have seen in any theatre in many years, to the skilful direction and staging by Guthrie McClintic, and to such high-grade performances as those of Burgess Meredith, Richard Bennett and a new and oddly insinuating young actress who goes by the name of Margo. That Mr. McClintic is rapidly becoming one of our front-rank producers, and one of unusual taste, is, for all his periodic perplexing missteps, increasingly evident. One can only hope that he will soon abandon his passion for all those idiotic baby-spotlights which, shooting out in all directions from the wings and elsewhere, often make his productions look like so many electionnight flash bulletins. If he doesn't and continues to persist in them it probably won't he long before he w ill he hailed by various asses as a second Belasco, and then may God have mercy on him!

If there is among the younger English comedy playwrights a more adept and tickling writer of light dialogue than John Van Drutcn, Captain Anthony Eden has not yet confided his name to me. Indeed, I do Van Drutcn something of an injustice with that qualifying phrase, "younger English playwrights', for among the middle-aged themselves I can think only of Maugham—and perhaps Lonsdale—as his superiors in that quarter. What is more, there is a penetration of character and an observational wit in him that are absent from the other smart young Englishmen's superficially amusing badinage. But, like some of them, he on occasion unfortunately denies his gay feathery lines the substantiality of a dramatic pillow covering, with the result that they float all about in the air and decline to settle down into a compact play for the comfort of an audience's head.

Van Druten's aforementioned considerable virtues and sometime faults are visible in his newest comedy, Most of the Game. Nor, when I mention his present particular fault of doing everything for the dialogue that he does not do for the underlying play, am I even so one to complain too loudly, for I happen to be one of those bizarre criticusses who much prefer no body whatsoever in a play to the rather corpsey and slightly reasty bodies that a number of the school of lighter playwrights deem vital and necessary. The relatively greater fault here, oddly enough, is his unwonted incorporation into his otherwise smoothly humorous dialogue of several wheezes so ancient and asthmatic that they give one critical pause. Surely, Van Drutcn is the last man you'd think of to resort to the mangy vaudeville gag about the man who orders the whole bill-of-fare and then, by way of an additional fillip, a cup of coffee. Or to the ones about Alice Foote MacDougall and Wagnerian opera.

■ STANZA III—Sidney Howard's dramatization of the Humphrey Cobb novel, Paths of Glory, constituted a much more available movie script than a dramatic one and it will probably come in handy when the Paramount company, that put up the money for the play, takes it over for Hollywood purposes. On the stage, what with its many difficult shifts of scene and its innumerable and often indistinguishable characters, together with incidents and episodes that were dramatically gratuitous and impeded the action, it was stulT both ocularly and aurally tedious. The Hopkins production. furthermore, was even slower in tempo than the script and the long succession of dark changes contributed additionally to the persuasions of the Sandman.

Plays like this, endlessly impressing upon us the sensational news that war is hell, are, whatever their quality, getting to be something of a bore. A good low lewd farce showing us another side of the business would be a welcome novelty. A friend of mine in Berlin, a high cavalry officer in the German army during the World War, is currently writing a book that might be nicely converted into such a stage entertainment. It is a record of personal experiences during the long campaign; its title is, simply, War; and it concerns itself wholly and entirely, from first page to last, not with gunfire, cooties, blood and miserable death, but with girls, love, booze and general hoopla. I shall, the moment I get word of its dramatization, engage at least fifteen seats.

Blind Alley, by James Warwick, is a very fair melodrama (Continued on page 68) built upon the recreative theme of a psychiatrist, his household invaded by a gangster-gunman, who undertakes slowly to destroy the mind and confidence of the murderous intruder and who succeeds finally in driving him to suicide. It is well played by a company headed by George Coulouris, as the psychoanalytical G-man, and by Roy Hargrave, as the dillinger, and constitutes lively stuff of the lesser theatre.

(Continued from page 40)

Squaring the Circle, the much discussed Soviet comedy by Valentine Katayev that has been running prosperously in Moscow for something like three or four years and that has been offered as evidence of our Communist friends' ability to laugh at themselves, proves, if nothing else, that we less jocund and more grave American democrats do not share their sense of humor. The play, in essence, is nothing more than the stale French farce about the two hapless married couples who find that they are wedded to the wrong mates and who duly rectify the situation, with numerous allusions to Karl Marx, Lenin, dialectic materialism and the petty bourgeoisie substituted for the customary Gallic sex double entendre. In its native land, where a four-hour performance of King Lear on a dimly lighted stage or a sovietized Hamlet on a stage that the audience couldn't make out at all had hitherto of necessity been accepted as the mediums of a hot old time, its avid and enthusiastic acceptance is readily comprehended, like a gob's first night on land after a long period at sea, a patriotic teetotaler's first swig of kerosene and door-knob polish upon the repeal of Prohibition, or a Briinnhilde's reverberating busting of a corset-string in the third act of Siegfried. Over here, however, things are a bit different.

A Russian gentleman named Dmitri Ostrov, who staged the piece locally, added to the doldrums of the occasion by elaborating the original script with various lengthy and repetitious "clarifications of the elements of Soviet background" and by casting the play with such farceurs as would send Three Men on a Horse to the storehouse overnight.

STANZA IV.— The critical attitude toward George Gershwin's "American folk opera", Porgy and Bess, would be considerably more hospitable if it were offered simply as a play with music. The present label is altogether too magniloquent and immodest. As a musicalized play it has its points of merit, but as a folk opera it is strikingly defective. Nor is this the viewpoint of a precisionist, the kind of donkey who operates according to an inflexible set of rules, most of them silly, and who judges everything purely by its label. Label or no label, the Gershwin effort fails interiorly of its purpose. Posturing as a folk opera, it resolves itself finally and essentially into little more than an elaborate and superior musical show with the dialogue given over to singing instead of speaking voices. That Mr. Gershwin has a very definite talent for musical comedy is beyond question. But that his talent is equal to the demands of

anything approaching true and genuine folk opera remains still for the future to answer.

This Porgy and Bess contains some symptoms of hope for the aforesaid future. In certain of the choral passages there is a measure of compositional distinction. In the rhythmic Negro idioms there is an undeniable skill. And in several of the jazz passages Mr. Gershwin excels himself. But elsewhere the score, while first-rate Broadway, remains something much less than first-rate anything else. It isn't that many of the musical numbers are not good in themselves. It is simply that they are very much more appropriate to Broadway musical comedy or revue than to the purpose which Mr. Gershwin had in mind. The accompanying lyrics, furthermore, the product of Ira Gershwin and DuBose Heyward, emphasize these numbers' strangeness in the strange land of f«»Ik opera. It Ain't Necessarily So, for example, with its tricky Ira Gershwin rhymings, is high-grade Winter Garden but very low-grade folk opera, and such items as I Cot Plenty o' Nut tin, I Loves You, Porgy, and There's a Boat That's Leavin' Soon for New York (sung by that great Negro folk artist, Mr. Bubbles, of Buck & Bubbles, vaudeville clog dancers) assuredly are more aptly suited to a stage with Tiller or Albertina Rasch girls periodically on it, and with Everett Marshall in blackface and Norma Terris as Magnolia Lee of ol' Virginny, than to a stage pretending to any degree of operatic eminence.

Jubilee, which pretends to be nothing more than a Broadway musical show and which hasn't a fugue, a recitative or a folk opera arioso in it from start to finish, is the stuff of gay and lively light amusement. And, for good measure, it is by all odds the most handsomely staged thing of its kind that New York has seen since Jehovah called Ziegfeld. Cole Porter's tunes and lyrics may not always be up to his mark, although they are, even so, pretty chuckleful, and Moss Hart's booh may be a little repetitious here and there, but the show in its entirety has a jollity of movement, a warm and tasty humor and a merry swing that lift it into the deserved hit class.

Presenting royalty on the loose and as truant to traditional decorum, the book, aided by song and dance, is sprinkled with smart jabs at a variety of persons in the public eye, thus achieving that flavor of "sophistication" which in recent years has become the fashionable thing in American musical shows. The only flaw in the present instance of this sophistication is a falling back upon such overworked and overly familiar targets as Gertrude Stein, Elsa Maxwell, Noel Coward, and the like. One of these days someone is going to add a few new members to the old sophisticated stock company and have his carriage drawn uptown by a delighted public. But don't think that I'm going on grumbling. Any show that is as generally entertaining as this one and as lovely to look upon is good enough for anybody, critic or no critic.