Life and Limelight in London

CAMPBELL LEE

PLAYGOING London, having almost collapsed from bomb-fever, daylight-dining, the taxi-famine and Elizabethan revivals, is once more able to sit up and take a little musical comedy. Lyrical plays are crowding everything else off the dramatic course with the insolence of a Derby field. Whatever drought and desolation the short beer supply has wrought in certain quarters there is yet froth enough in stageland to put heart into the Seven Million.

PERHAPS the ladies with the beautiful shoulders who occupy the boxes lean forward a little more eagerly, laugh a little more silvery at "The Happy Day" than elsewhere. This cannot be because the costumes of the new Daly success are exclusively gorgeous or the members of the superbly incompetent chorus monopolistically beautiful or because Mr. Paul Rubens' lyrics, like Somebody's Chocolates, are to be procured only at this theater. At the other singable things, "Toto," "Tina," "Samples," "Half Past Eight" (to drag in only a few) dresses and damsels beggar .description and producers while on the rhythmic Rubens . . . who has kindly consented to write all the music for all the plays during the war! . . . the sun simply never sets. No. "The Happy Day" is booked up to Christmas mainly because its skits and skirts and songs madly revolve around the romance . . . perennially sympathetic to an English audience ... of a slim and boyish Prince whose Almanach dc Gotha obligations compel him to motor over to the next kingdom and wed a strange and loathed-in-advance Princess. The Princess, a Slavonic lady, feels quite as does her Compulsory Betrothed about the A-de-G business. But you will never guess what happens! The two meet, incognito, at a Night Club {sic!) . . . the customary last hour of freedom! . . . when straightway their love .passes understanding and the Censor and they proceed to live happily as long as most married people. "Mixed marriages are made at Murray's," says Lauri de Frece, one of the Court crowd. A laughter-monger after Bergson's heart, this Compton-MacKenzie brother-in-law. He wears the ring of Gyges with reverse effect, incomparably unconscious of his comicality for others. A sagacious stroke at Daly's is the lavishness with which the colors and uniforms of the "eastern theater" have been drawn on for the stage pictures. Serbia, Poland, Russia, Montenegro furnish a background which it is pleasant for once to see associated with a happy day.

ANOTHER Ariadnean Night's Entertainment that is harvesting profits like a McCormick reaper is "Tina" at the Adelphi. Tina (pretty, daring Phyllis Dare) is really Cocotina (her father King of the Cocoa Knuts) shortened so that people may get home before the buses stop. .Captain Harry Graham's wit, the most diverting dances since Johnthe-Baptist days and the breezy Berry abound. So do the Last Seven Chorus Youths . . . or is it six? ("All above military age or otherwise exempt") left in London. There is an amusing scene achieved by a flight of steps, Albert-Mcmorial-like, up and down which dancers tango and trot as gaily as if the place were the floor of the House of Commons; there arc tunes which, unlike bananas at the table d'hote, may be carried away with one ,and there's a limited amount of wearing apparel designed by a Lady named Lucile that is enough to make the Women's Service Corps throw their khaki-helmets on the floor and stamp on 'em. As for the swaying sirens in their lucilings, well! Mr. McKenna is said to be already taking steps to suppress this spendthrift pageant of pulchritude. But perhaps the best of Tina is "Eve." Eve in England is, of course, Fish in Vanity Fair and America. The defile of this artiste's famous ladies in their whimsicalest war paint furnishes the fantasy for the third act. Fish runs the black-andwhite gamut with an invention that would startle Yvette Guilbert's famous ball guests at Martinique where, as she tells you in her song, "Tout le mondc est en noir."

LUCRATIVE farce was in the hands of the Americans until "Ye Gods!" descended on London. Said gods were shipped to Jimmy Carter's country house ahead of Uncle Conway returning from an archeological orgy in the East. Jimmy, to amuse a house party, auctions off the bronze bogies in the drawing-room one dull night. In an excess of high spirits he goes so far as to slap one of them in the face and to express himself with sacrilegious flippancy about the clan in general. Doomed Jimmy! A thundcr-like outburst of rage on the part of the head deity flings the young man to the floor and scatters the guests like black magic. In darkness and swoon Jimmy hears his sentence pronounced. For his impiety let the Love Curse be upon him! All women shall love him save the woman hr loves. She shall 1-o-a-t-h-e him! Jimmy comes to as from a bad dream. That it was not the lobster, however, begins to dawn when the parlor maid, his promised mother-in-law, the Colonel's lady, the Vicar's muslin daughter, the affianced wives of all his pals, and every other female within range sinks upon his neck at sight. All except Kitty, his Betrothed. Kitty was the most unreasonably jealous person before the Deluge; she couldn't even stand seeing her lover embracing other pretty girls in conservatories or on the .back seat of motor cars without making a row. Now she's as indifferent as ice. The climax comes when Jimmy, pursued by the whole demoniacal pack of Love-Curst ladies, runs into Uncle Conway in the hall. Uncle upon learning the situation from Nephew's pallid lips immediately produces an antidote. Nothing can check the Love Curse until it has run its course, but if Jimmy, at the supreme moment, will take refuge on the pedestal of the Offended One and repeat a certain exorcising formula, all will be as it was in the old happy, scrappy days with Kitty. The exhausted youth loses no time in the propitiation rite . . . Presto! Everything's sane again! Nobody remembers a thing about the disgraceful affair and Jimmy, who is thought merely to have fainted, goes back to the dream theory and his fiancee. Capital fun is supplied by the frenzied ladies chanting a bloodthirsty Egyptian coon song as they chase the wild young man through the house and around the garden. The audience departs resolved to dust its Oriental objets d'art with respect in the future if not to retire them altogether.

CONGREVE'S second play, "The Double Dealer" (with Henry Purcell's enchanting music, written for the original production), was the Stage Society's recent concession to the "anti-problem" temper of the times. The comedy had not been given in England since 1802 when Kemble played Maskwell, "Prince of pink heels and the soul of empty eminence," and George the Fourth's little friend Decamp enacted Peg Woffington's famous part of Lady Plyant.