The Theatre: The New Season

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(See front cover)

Long before the first golden-rod grows bright in far away fields, the yellow lights of the new season are raised above Broadway. By September, usually, the first hit has arrived in town; the streets off Times Square are crammed with stage folk who hope this winter not to play Des Moines; the dramatic critics, yellow and sick from uncustomary contact with the sun, are once more being kittenish on the keys. At the centre of all this glittering activity are the producers; it depends upon them whether the new year shall be tawdry or delightful.

There are in New York only about a dozen really important producers. Their names remain fixed while those of actors shine and grow dark. David Belasco, Lee Shubert and his brother Jake, Sam Harris, "Ziggy," the Selwyns, George M. Cohan, Winthrop Ames, William A. Brady, A. H. Woods, George White, Dillingham—everyone who sees plays or reads about them has heard of these. There is only one new man among the first-line producers. Younger than the rest but equally successful, he took it easy last week while others were in a ferment of excitement, getting their new offerings ready for the stage. Having already supplied Broadway with the first success of the season, The Front Page, he stated erroneously that he was through producing plays, went to the country, and contemplated not the future but the past.

His past, as such, was pleasant. Jed Harris, né Jacob Horowitz, could not remember when his family came from Vienna to live in Newark, N. J. But he could remember living there, in a small and hideous house, and going to high school to get ready for college. Of Yale, too, he had pleasant memories. Not the nostalgic memories of a college hero but the more delicious, spiteful recollection of unpopularity among those whom he has since surpassed. At Yale, Jake Horowitz was not the type. After two years, he left Yale and went to Europe.

There was, just after the War, some difficulty in sending money from the U. S. to certain states in the interior of Europe. To insure safety, people who wanted to do so entrusted their currency to travelers rather than the mails. Jake Horowitz got the notion that it might be profitable to act as a paid courier for this purpose and set out, with several companions, to do so. By the time the party reached Paris, they were broke. When they drew lots to see which one should stay in Paris instead of going further, Horowitz got the short straw. Paris, he knew, was no place for a Yale French scholar to live in, so he went to London and stayed there among the chop suey dishes and Chinese laundries of the Limehouse district. When he came back to the U. S., he was a stowaway in the stoker's forecastle of a tramp ship.