Show makes successful S. L. stopover By MAX GREEN Churning into the Stadium bowl on its maiden voyage to the Beehive state Wednesday the loudly tooting Kern-Hammerstein-Ferber tied up after compacting into three hours some fifty years of river-boat The play started out with a flat-footed hurh despite the effusiveness of floundered in the horse latitudes until Kenneth Spencer as rendered Man His range from and to a little drunk and in each accented with self assurance and the resonance of a six-foot five-inch I dare say that no one in the audience stretched his neck for the high notes or used body-english to reach the low they just listened and liked what they Spencer might do to ask himself if the slurring of his words near the end of this selection is not unpleasantly The most adverse criticism of this play is centered on the slow Until the racial question of much blood makes a was settled in the third scene of act the whole cast just didn't get down to the serious business of There was restraint in the voices of the chorus and listlessness in the speeches Of the When Dumke appeared to welcome the spectators to the Cotton Blossom one almost felt as though he were exhorting the cast to on with The beginning of the interlude had the same strain of retraction that characterized the greater part of the first Miss Engel did quite was fresh and but Charles just wouldn t let his vocal cords He he sang but he just wasn't convincing as the roguish interloper wooing the innocent If he could have sung the selection with both feet on the ground instead of an a stack of packing cases he probably would have felt more and thus sounded more more When he and Miss Engel were bathed in blue lights and footed substantially on the upper deck of the Cotton the music of Are rung true was less less and less from the teeth It is entirely possible that wind blowing across the microphones of the sound system impaired to some degree the final reception of but it sounded more like tight Miss Engel sparkled throughout the while Miss Page flickered And rightly for the hm- of the particular parts of these ladies imposed such Help Dat was introduced with the nostalgic voice of Miss Page and then was taken u by Salt Lake's Elizabeth who seemed more at home with the tune regardless of the hint that Julie might also be natively enough to do it Elizabeth Flake definitely has The encore of by Miss was an improvement over the first The latter seemed to make a greater distinction between mere and sincere The comedy high-spot came off thanks to Ross Mary Ethel Eccles and Ralph The bumbling Frank was set forth by Ramsey as an amusing foil for the brittle-voiced sauci-ness of Miss comedy queen of the Cotton Unrequited and rather foolish love-talk is usually followed by a farce of some sort and in this case it was the riotous shenanigans of Andy on a tom-cat violin with Engel and Charles filling When Mountaineer shot up the Dumke had to finish off the mad affair with a gyrating synopsis of the play within a Parson's The gag that made the audience gasp was when Dumke seized a dashed it to the and then stepped back in a satisfied stance as it rebounded in one great arc into the orchestra Dumke's summation of the interrupted play gave him his best opportunity to be funny and he didn't muff He he he he fell prostrate and jiggled his huge tummy and each time got a of laughs in When you sit some fifty yards away from the stage-it is arms and legs and torsos that come across the There not enough dancing the kind that Tucker and engaged A punch-line is too easily lost upon the The actors must speak in such measured tones and accents that that it is far too easy to and thus spoil a belly I felt that in had this It was too easy to call his When geared to out-of-door proportions such as we have there seems to be a distinct sacrifice of speed and emotion for power and The veterans of this particular the seemed to have the edge over the imported stars in this It may well be that their balance of preparation has given them this Experience of the in the Utah bowl have been of less duration than that of Miss Eccles or Even with the change from bowl to bowl requires fair One aspect of this production that certainly comes off beautifully is the change of The blackness of the night itself furnishes a much pleasanter fore-drop than the barrier of a bona fide curtain under a For my the distinction between the reality of a seat in the audience and the make-believe of the stage is not so incisive under night-air Lees and Mr Adix have used this technique in all of their that I have and seem to be making improvements and revisions each Sans the bankroll of last year's stadum it is quite obvious that costuming was tightly There was a distinct lack of contrast in the costumes of the levee chorus and dancers to those of the Since the levee has been it occurs to me that the only way to make a bag or bale of cotton look heavy on the stage is to make the thing Seeing the stevedores toss their wares around like down pillows detracts the audience from the solemnity and intended emotional persuasion of Spencer's Man Miss the chorus and the company of dancers were plied by unseen hands to knit the show They most certainly did not seem different from the imported stars through lack of experience but rather were different as a stand of native timber is different from a palm It ought to be observed that such thing as particularly for would certainly carry attendant I understand that Charles had a touch of for shortly after his arrival Unpredictable troubles such as a slight cold are certainly aggravated by the conditions of a bowl performance in a foreign climate and It is also important to recognize and admit that a home-grown judgment of imported talent is even It is not to beg the question to point out that an audience seek out faults in the stranger while he overlooks or sanctions shortcomings of local To has played to and the response of of them on Saturday last is adequate basis that another fifteen or twenty thousand wul clamor to see it before it No one gets whatever he when he sees The the staging and the acting combine with a real moon and real stars to make an entertaining melange of fiction and |