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Show NEW YORK'S NEW SHOWS "He Came From Milwaukee" "Anti-matrimony" "The Deserter" "Decorating I Clementine." By FRANKLIN FYLES. New York, Sept. 30. Musical farces of London Lon-don make are the joint work of half a dozen men, more or less, including a writer of a story, rhym-sters rhym-sters to provide verses for songs and choruses to put into it, musicians to give tunes to them and especially an adept to shape the various materials to comic and comely commotion. The same system sys-tem has been followed partially in America by interpolations, in-terpolations, but our best librettists and composers compos-ers .have insisted on collaborating in pairs. "He , Came from Milwaukee" is the first instance in which the program has named in equal size type I so many makers as Mark Swan, Edward Madden, Ben Jerome, Louis Hirsh and Melville Ellis. To those Sam Bernard might be added, if he were not printed bigger as the boss comedian, for as usual his role gives plain signs of his own humor. ' These plays look easy, especially the good ones; J but it isn't so. . ' The display of girls in "He Came from Mil- j waukee" is fine indeed. They are new to Broad- way, mostly, and the several dozens stately for court ladies, pliant for gypsies, agile for ballets I and so on are matched up so precisely as to heights and shape that not the smallest variation can be detected in any row of them. They wear costumes beautiful in designs and exquisite in , textures. And enough of the fabric is used to j cover the girls decently; yet I haven't seen a i ballet-chorus more admired in a long while. No- torious old connoisseurs and collectors of show- J girls sat stare-eyed and gape-mouther in surprise that so decorous an exhibition could be so very satisfying. Two guesses are pertinent to "Anti-Matrimony." Will a burlesque of free love, if written in a distinctly literary style, make a popular en- J tertainment without antic or frolic for fun? If so, Percy Mackaye is a lucky author. Will such a , piece, played by one fine comedienne and only j four mediocre companions, even half fill the thea- , tres in which it is given? If so, Henrietta Cros- ', 1 man is a lucky actress, keeping one eye and one ear opentoa tolerant New York audience, whiie devoting the others to the performance, I took in ' the Impression that, despite Crosman's old and Mackaye's new vogue with keen-witted people, "Anti-Matrimony" may please but a few and bore many. The Elliott Greys are an orthodox young clergyman and his wife in a staid New England i parsonage. The Morris Greys are advocates of I free lovers and marriage abolitionists. The Mor ris Greys come from Europe to visit the Elliott Greys, bringing along a baby and bragging that it was born out of wedlock, as its parents have on principle refrained from marriage. In truth that assertion is a lie, however, for secretly they are husband and wife; but for the purpose of example in an anti-matrimony crusade, they de- clare themselves paramouis and their child a I bastard. The pious and moral mother of the two men is grief-stricken. The clergyman's wife undertakes un-dertakes to avert the scandal by curing the indecency inde-cency before the community learn of it. Henrietta Crosman misses her annual cuss-tag for a climax. One year it was a mere damn-it. Next year it was a damn-you-all. The third year she feels constrained to eschew profanity and lets an oh-hell go to some one else. Still, she is ! a breezy creature, at times tornadic; and finally she blows free love out of the household with a I hot simoon of passion. That sensual whirlwind is a false pretense, though, and is meant to throw dust into the eyes and heart of her erring brother-in-law. Her plan is to break his free-love pact with his secretly legalized but openly disavowed I wife by seducing him to herself and thereby mak- I ing her sister-in-law so furiously jealous that she I will produce the concealed certificate of marriage. 1 Three hundred dollars a week to double the I short salary list would provide four players able to make Miss Urosman's whole exploit as humorous hu-morous as her own share in it and one thousand for a fully satisfactory cast might bring in three or four at the doors in Broadway anyway. All ! by her unaided self she is very vivacious -in the midst of stolidity. With excessive fervor she pur-' pur-' ports to be a convert to anti-matrimony through I passionate adoration of its apostle. Herwoman's wile and his man's vanity combined to foozle him. Beside this caloric proselyte his own fond wife t seems cool. The pretender takes the pretext of a charade to costume herself as a Spanish siren and dance a maddening tarantella. He leaps to her arms as an ardently embracing partner in a waltz. She avows herself his enslaved convert to free love and he throws aside his wife to get the new affinity. Then the laugh is on him. His theories can't stand the test of ridicule. He recants re-cants as an anti-matrimonialist. The play ends with the brothers and their wives paired for connubial con-nubial felicity and the mother nappy. One has reason enough to believe that "The Deserter" is going to be a series of surprises a sort of running, "Oh, my's!" For the curtain does not rise at all on the "incident" which precedes the four acts of the play. One is greeted by the familiar, handsome curtain of the modern New York theatre where the new drama was produced. pro-duced. But, lo and behold! instead of It really being that well-known drapery it turns out to be a deceptive copy. For instead of being lifted for Ithe "incident" a light slowly breaks through what proves to be gauze painted to look like velvet, and we get a shadowy view of a room beyond. In this room the small parlor of an officer's house in a western army post four persons do Just about all the things they would not do. They do them tensely, hysterically. The second lieutenant, lieu-tenant, drunk, calls on the first lieutenant's wife, knowing her husband will be away. But others wore "on" also. Indeed, the captain is already being entertained in her bedroom. The second I! lieutenant is enraged, strikes him and with more respect for a four-act play to follow than common sense immediately presumes his rival to be dead and, turning abruptly R. U. E., rushes into hiding. hid-ing. One need hardly add that the "corpse" arises full of vigor and conversation and takes up his love-making at the very point of interruption. But husband, sober, returns and shoots him dead. No question this time. And a mystery revealed just spoiling for a detective. The scene fades from view, and, facing the imitation curtain we await four acts and the star. The star of "The Deserter" is one worth waiting wait-ing for. Six years ago Helen Ware was "leading adventuress" in a cheap company that carried "Soldiers of Fortune" on a fourth-season tour of the small cities. Her rise has been rapid; and though she might prefer to read of it as due to a certain rich and ripe brunette beauty which some see in her and some do not, she may prefer the truth that success has come to her through sheer, unaided talent. She is an actress; and H though some may find in her the 'element of al- 1 lurement, a concensus of opinion proves that she M is one of those thorough performers who so thor- M oughly, honestly and self-effacingly play a role H that almost sense of personality is lost. Anna Alice Chapin and Robert Peyton Carter wrote in collaboration. Perhaps they did it on H their honeymoon they were married three or M four years ago. For one feels that things have H been left in that only a honeymoon delicacy a M new and tender hesitancy to honest criticism M could have allowed. The fact that a fist does H not leave a puncture by a bullet wound is over- M looked, so a female detective is employed. By M means of making the intimate acquaintance of M every unaccounted man from Kansas to Califor- M nia she finally finds the runaway murderer. This M occurs in a saloon, where she watches San Fran- M (Continued on Pago 1G ) jH NEW YORK'S NEW SHOWS. (Continued from Pago 7.) cisco come and go from beneath the disguise of first man with military bearing who enters turns out to be the very one she is looking for, but that Miss Ware, the actress, suddenly presents a singing voice that would doubtless make fame and fortune for her in light opera. A few years ago in "The Pretty Sister of Jose," Maude Adams surprised us in quite the same way. "The Deserter" which just escaped being entitled en-titled "Delia of the Secret Sen ice" goes on to tell how the female detective falls in love with her victim and would save him from arrest by the "Fedora" method of telling the police he was her lover and to get out till morning. But he nips such an idea in the bud, gives himself up, and leaves her to emulate that other Sardou heroine, Dora of "Diplomacy," and bring the third act to a close by beating herself frantically against the door that has closed behind him. Not fine clothes nor any toilet adornments are exploited in "Decorating Clementine." The decoration deco-ration is a medal of the French Legion of Honor. Clementine gets it by writing novels and doing some cleverer work. The books are done when the play begins and their character is not disclosed; dis-closed; but the action shows the other achievement. achieve-ment. Clementine has no desire for the medal until she is told that another woman is likely to get it. Then she is determined to have it. When It is pinned on her bosom she tears it off and throws it away because she finds out that the rival novelist is not a woman, but a man with a feminine nom de plume. The theme of "Decorating Clementine" is foreign, for-eign, but so witty is the composition and so clever the acting that keen-humored Americans may enjoy en-joy it. In Paris it has been a very popular attack on the French system of official awards of merit in art and literature. The minister is recognizable recogniz-able there as a caricature of a real official so unfit for his place that he can name only three of the Nine Muses; nor can any one in his bureau staff recall more than five; and so dull is his staff that for a while the idea of looking in an enclycopedia isn't broached. In the New York performance Louis Massen makes him a fussy, funny old fossil, dead to his own pretty wife but enlivened by another an-other man's. The fun of farce and burlesque are in this odd comedy, and G. P. Huntly, the English comedian, is its chief exponent. He is a ballet director and by force of habit uses pantomime profusely with a ballad singer. The real surprise is not that the r his talk. In one passage he shows the characteristic character-istic gaits of various persons figuring in an anecdote. anec-dote. That new idea is grotesquely used. To see Huntly mincing for a belle or striding for a beau, skipping for a soubrette or marching for a soldier, sol-dier, shifting from one to another impersonation in his narrative, is comic proof that there may be something new under the calcium sun. A Russian dance, too, by Huntly and Doris Keane, turns the comedy for five minutes into a beauty show. Doris, for her own diversion and the audience'shas au-dience'shas the ballet director teach her a ma-zuka ma-zuka that would make the two a top-liner in a team in vaudeville. |