Theatre: New Plays: Jan. 24, 1927

Ghosts. Ibsen's tragedy employing a pathological mishap as symbol of the hideous immorality that easily hides beneath "respectability," is familiar to Broadway. Last year it was done, and the year before and. . . . The plot is taken up with the attempt to build an orphan asylum in honor of Chamberlain Alving, deceased, the while his son's brain softens from inherited syphilis. As a play it is remarkable less for its profundity than for the technical mastery with which it swells through a gorgeous crescendo to a thunderclap climax. Interpretation of the Mrs. Alving's role by Minnie Maddern Fiske, 61, is different. What is usually a sad, ironical figure, she turns into a deftly satirical one. Though affording Mrs. Fiske's admirers an opportunity to exclaim once again over her genius for discovering comedy in almost any kind of situation, it failed to accord with the sombre mood of a drama of doom. Theodore St. John, as Oswald of the softening brain, convincing at times, seemed entirely too self-possessed in the crisis.

Bye, Bye, Bonnie is the usual musical comedy unusually well done. Its best features: the acting of Dorothy Burgess who strives seriously to smile success through this her first musical comedy role; an excellently trained chorus; the song " 'Cross the River from Queens." The plot: a Dry millionaire soap manufacturer, arrested in a night club, switches to the Wets after a month in jail, with such success that he is elected to Congress, and his daughter and pet office girl are free to marry their respective tenors. Bide Dudley (dramatic critic of the N. Y. Evening World) and Louis Simon (actor in the play) wrote the book, worked in many a laugh, also insinuated a jail scene, one of those atrociously vulgar burlesques on sex perversion so popular this year. It was greeted enthusiastically, justifying entirely the discretion of the writers. The audience left the theatre whistling " 'Cross the River . . ." in a thousand different keys, in uniformly cheerful spirit.

American Grand Guignol. One might expect the French horror-plays, in view of the season's successful exploitation of all phases of sex perversion, to prove fascinating box-office material. Not so. Perhaps it is because the theatre is way down in one of the Greenwich Village nooks of inaccessibility; possibly because one-act plays do not sell in Manhattan; possibly, also, because the production is heavyhanded. In one play, a paralytic suddenly discovers he has the ability to strangle daughter-in-law, which he does with gusto. In another, choice Chinese diabolisms are dramatized. On the whole, there is a great deal of cruelty with a minimum of refinement.