Theatre: New Plays in Manhattan: Feb. 22, 1932

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Blessed Event Alvin Robert (Roger Pryor of Up Pops the Devil) was wasting his journalistic fragrance on the desert air of the New York Daily Express' advertising department. When the regular Broadway colyumist went on a vacation, Mr. Roberts was given a chance to pinch hit for him. This he did largely by printing premature birth notices about the offspring of people of prominence and notoriety, thus upping his tabloid's circulation by several thousand copies. The end of Blessed Event's first act, therefore, finds Mr. Roberts holding down the dirt dishing department permanently at $50 a week.

Act II, one year later, reveals Mr. Roberts feverishly telling all and reaping much richer reward. It also introduces a visitor from Chicago who is planning to make $2,000 by shooting Mr. Roberts for a Mr. Sam Gobel, whom certain of the colyum's items have offended, notably one which observed that the beer in one of the Gobel saloons looked out of place in a stein. Gallant Alvin Roberts, far from quaking at the gunman's proposal to kill him, exhibits a photograph of the late Murderess Ruth Snyder in the electric chair and mentions the twisted fingers, the binding straps, the burning hair which accompany an electrocution. He also reveals that the gunman's threat has been dictaphoned.

But Mr. Roberts' troubles are not over. One young woman whom he tattles on has been wronged by Sam Gobel himself. When Colyumist Roberts intrudes on a night club opening, from which he has been barred, Sam Gobel directs two of his mermydons to finish the task that his first emissary failed to accomplish. It is in this, the play's last act, that Blessed Event cinches its claim to first rate melodrama.

Walter Winchell of the Daily Mirror, after whom Blessed Event's fearless though imprudent hero is modeled, was present on the first night accompanied by a bodyguard, a precaution he has taken since he recorded the recent arrival of several Chicago bravos in Manhattan.