| OCR Text |
Show Pf""Ov7 llsaryorl ' MSs &ttumimtd QPlgfornw j ! By GEORGE JEAN NATHAN". F! LORENZ ZIEGFELD, the moat pro- flclent of our music show producers, pro-ducers, makes his initial entry into the field of dramatic exhibition with a play imported from Lon- j don the work of Austin Page and called "By Pigeon Post." In the production, Mr. Ziegfeld reveals himself either as an im- presario of very high sagacity or as one j of very small sagacity, depending entirely i upon whether the results ho has achieved were deliberate or accidental. The play which Mr. Ziegfeld has selected select-ed for his first production Is a so-called war play, and as such one of the most inept of the great lot of war plays wherewith where-with the Machiavellian Hohenzoilerns and Ludendorffa doubtless indirectly hoped to unseat the Anglo-Saxon reason. if Mr. Ziegfeld appreciated the extreme badness of this particular opus and during the period of rehearsals shrewdly told I liis actors to mumble the lines so the audiences could not make them out, Mr. Ziegfeld is, as 1 have ventured, an exceptionally excep-tionally astute dramatic producer. But if. ou the other hand, Mr. Ziegfeld actually saw virtues in the manuscript, then Mr. Ziegfeld has made a sorry first bow and what credit there is goes to the bad actors. ac-tors. I attended the play on the opening night, and, seated in the seventh row, was unable to hear two-thirds of what the mummers were talking about. The one-third one-third I cid hear was pretty awful stuff and this Is why 1 am inclined to believe that Mr. Ziegfeld thought it wisest to cast his bad play with worse actors. Not an Accident. Certainly no such group of actors could have been chosen accidentally; the company com-pany showed all the signs of having been intentionally selected for its inabii'itv to read lines intelligibly. Vincent Serrano a virtuoso in the matter of reciting lines 1 so no one can decipher them; Jerome Pat- rick, a real professor of the art of swal lowing authors' speeches, and seven! others in tho presenting organization wen unquestionably located by Mr. Ziegfeld only after an assiduous! searching. So far as I could discover, "By Pigec: Post" tells the story of a German sp: and a French renegade who conspire u prevent a celebrated carrier fowl fnz conveying .an important message to i point somewhere in tiie wings, but vhc are outwitted at quarter of eleven by i girl in a Red Cross nurse's uniform. 1 single set employed in the play is work of Joseph Urban, and is attracti" Other members in the acting atjgree.!!' are Miss Phoebe Foster, Mi.s P-O'Neill P-O'Neill (badly miscast as ihe chaufK to the French commander), and k dc; capable pigeons. It is to be hoped ir Mr. Zicgfeld's secend dramr.tic enterpr.. will be, a, happier one. At the S-?lwyn theater, still another play, this one the joint effort of V Messrs. Edgar Selwyn and Channins ?' lock. Undeniably effective so far as l popular theater audience is copceraei)- and manufactured with considerable S'"" the work is revealed r.s beinp intr callv little more than a conventional (r-angle (r-angle story placed against a war back ground. An ex-chorus girl, the heroine of !; play, is the physical property of '. nu ried man. The letter's wife makes up th third angle of the triangle. Action Is Rapid. The chorus girl and her lover go ' France to lend their services to the al!!-cause, al!!-cause, the girl as a telephone operate the man as a soldier. The wife foliO as a nurse. The man is cattpnt in trap bv the German mihtary forces r the cirl must decide whether she telephone the message that will F3ve ir and send 12,000 other allied soldiers : their death, or vice versa. A light denly conies to her. Her features u-on u-on a divine caste. The war has ennot-i ennot-i her! Click click she sends the call it. , means death to her lover. But present of course, the lover rushes onto the su; ' (Continued on Following Page.) THE Ml YORK STAGE (Continued from Preceding Page.) whole and the girl, still ennobled, turna him o t to his wife. V l tie plai'-.lv enough, to inflame tho Chaihs Garviee cultand that ll.is cult is still an ample one is proved nightly in the instance of the Sol wyn-Pol lock drama. As has been said, tne authors have gone about their business of building build-ing a ptjr.ular show with practiced hands) and, doubtless chuckling up their sleeves, are count ing the resulting moneys with Uvrriv fim-rers. Their co;,iic relief is adroitly manipulate.! manipu-late.! through the character of a timid Krondwav actor, who, though enlisted in tht- Y. M. C. A., observes that he is not particularly hot for Christian association, with the Huns. Miss Jane Cowl has the role of the chorus girl, and. while undoubtedly un-doubtedly a good choice for the part so far as the popular tasl e is concerned, overplays to the limit. Subtlety is no part of this actiess' equipment. Orme Cal-dara Cal-dara is seen in the role of the soldier lover and presents one of his customary distinctly actor performances: a thing of postures, pos-'s and face-makings all compact. com-pact. Mr. Selwyn has staged the play personally and has don the job very well. Amusing Farce. The sixth annual PrinceF theater musical mu-sical piece is called "Oh, My Dear," and, while not up to the standard set hy "Oh, Lady, Lady" and "Oh. Boy," still provides pro-vides amusing enough fare. The chorus Is particularly well drilled and the dressing dress-ing of the stage has been accomplished with exceptional taste. Guy Bolton's and. P. G. Wcdehouse's book shows clearly the strain these twain have been work-I work-I ing under. The sparkle of their antece-i antece-i dent librettos is missing. Louis Hirsch's score is inferior, too, to the Jerome Kern 1 scores of the past. The best member of the company Is tha droll Joseph Allen, the well-remembered, hermit of George Cohan's "Seven Keys to Baldpate" and the winking expressman of the same playwright's "Hit-the-Trml Holliday." This Allen is a very able comique, though his material in the current cur-rent exhibition is pretty trite stuff. Joseph Santley dances well, but he ha3 a colorless accomplice in the person of Mirs Ivy Saw yer. The latter, however, has attractive thin legs. Others fn tho corps are the Messrs. Roy Atwell and Frederick Graham and the Misses Juliette Day, Miriam Collins and Georgia Caine. The technic of the Princess theater shows is the amiable technic of the late George Edwardes; the subdued manner of production made famous in the London Gaiety exhibitions ar.d imitated In this country by the lat Charles Frohm.m. This technic is adroitly employed on the small Princess stage 'nd has proved uniformly uni-formly successful. The weakest spot in the latest show is the department of (he chorus. ' In the previous displays there have been disclosed at least two or three maidens whose faces and figures might lie gazed at without great difficulty. In the present offering, the closest scrutiny, allotted by double-lens glasses, fails to reveal re-veal a single even semi-Venus. In the little Bramhall playhouse, Butler But-ler Davenport, the valiant, is showing an opus of his own confection, "Difference in Gods." The work aims to he a study of the New Knglfcnd conscience in action a good theme but the treatment accorded ac-corded the theme by the playwright is sadly deficient in the qualities of imagination, imagi-nation, invention and philosophy. Mr. Davenport might make his llttl theater a distinctive visiting place, but thus far he has been content merely to vie with the Broadway showhouses that know how to do the sort of thing he la attempting very much better. Since his "Keeping Up Appearances," a promising play, Davenport has steadily been sliding further and further Into the coal-hole. He has stressed the risque out of all bounds and, by the easy means of screwing the loud sex pedal to the floor, ban attempted to attract a sensational attention to himself. He has failed, and signally. The day when the yokels became wildly excited over stage expositions of bathroom bath-room psychology has passed. "The Girl With the Whooping Cough," once on a ' time raided by the gendarmes, might play on Broadway today without disturbing aa eyelash. |
