Theatre: New Plays: Sep. 27, 1926

Naughty Riquette. Into some nonsense about a naughty Parisian telephone operator who proves in Monte Carlo that she is honest, the Shuberts have cast two capable performers. Mitzi, light-footed, long-haired, emerges from the dim past to yodel stale lines with broad vocal nuances. About her plump, Hungarian person the show revolves. From Stanley Lupino, English comedian, it draws its light. This superb clown flashes one of the season's gems in his sensational disclosure of the shocking impotence of Calvin Coolidge, Alfred Smith and Lloyd George, none of whom can lay eggs, grow ostrich feathers, or sit like a house fly in the saccharine stickiness of a raspberry tart. The chorus of toe-dancers flit about in movements more airy than usual. Theatre-goers can hardly afford to miss Comedian Lupino. The rest is mediocre.

Henry's Harem. Before a perplexed audience at the Greenwich Village Theatre, an abortive theatrical creature flapped its uncoordinated parts. For two acts it fumbled with Henry's problem— how to marry off three sisters in six months. Everything seems happily managed, when lo! into the third act comes an utterly unheralded complication—and Henry goes to the district attorney's office. It is gradually divulged that Henry, to adorn his sisters with a marital background, had bartered skim milk instead of cream. For no good reason he is released and the entire cast pairs off and marries, which is theatre for a happy ending. Al Roberts as a comedian gets no laughs.

Broadway. Into a poorer-than-average season strode the first unqualified success, Broadway, by Phillip Dunning, newcomer, and George Abbott, experienced collaborator, stage technician. Flimsy characterization amputates the play just short of greatness.

Off-stage cabaret dancers, unlovely, bawling, quarreling; on-stage cabaret dancers, lovely, smiling, gracious. Into this perennially intriguing background, stalk gangsters, murder, revenge, police, nicely offset by racy comic relief and a love affair between the show- off "hoofer" and his dancing sweetheart. The cast knows the life it is portraying; the authors know the life they are staging. The result is a meticulously realistic production, faithful even unto the garrulous hoofer's discarding his trousers before an unperturbed sweetheart.

Lee Tracy gives the best performance of his career as the show-off dedicated in spirit to a vaudeville dance at the Palace Theatre but delighted to serve in the McKeesport Opera House. Sylvia Field, late of The Little Spitfire, adorns the chorus as his honorably beloved, a good girl who "doesn't know her goulash." So vital is the background, so artfully sustained the suspense, that Broadway runs its entire length without one flagging moment.

Just Life. Vexed, Playwright John Bowie turned upon his critics. Said he in a neatly inserted advertisement : Gentlemen of the Press:

I thank you for your kind criticisms of my first play, "Just Life," at Henry Miller's Theatre.

JOHN BOWIE