Theatre: New Play in Manhattan: Dec. 27, 1937

Tell Me, Pretty Maiden (by Dorothy Day Wendell; produced by George Busbar and John Tuerk). Broadway still half believes that there's a broken heart for every light on it, still cultivates the legend of the gallant trouper who smiles through tears. In Tell Me, Pretty Maiden, Doris Nolan, home from such Hollywood productions as The Man I Many and As Good As Married, squanders her talents on the part of a gallant actress, Margo Dare. The persons who get told are a bevy of reporters who interview the lustrous Margo at a cocktail party arranged by her pressagent, Otto Hulett. While Margo tells them about her idyllic childhood among the jasmine bowers of the South, the curtains close. The orchestra plays Swanee River. The curtains then open on the squalid back yard of a New York tenement, showing the audience what Margo's childhood was really like. It was terrible. Her mother took in washing, and her younger brother (Charles Powers) was a budding thief.

Continuing the interview, Margo describes her innocent school days in a convent. The next scene shows where she really spent them—in a reformatory, where, to relieve the tedium and pad the act, the girls put on an impromptu play, Redlight Rosie. In Act III, the reporters are asking Margo how she got her start on the stage. Margo tells them of her romantic meeting with a producer in a conservatory at a friend's coming out party. When the curtains close this time, a few keen minds in the audience suspect that the next scene will not be a conservatory. True enough, Margo is shown waiting for her brother in a tawdry night club.

In a final spasm, still at the interview, Margo learns that her gangster brother has been shot in a prison break. Like a gallant trouper she chokes back her sobs, and the busy curtains close for keeps.