Who Was That Lady I Seen You Walking With?

Suggesting That Stage Humour Is Better Off for the Brave Touch of Backroads and Burlesque Shows

HEY WOOD BROUN

THE Duchess in Clair de Lune implored her gentleman friend to speak to her roughly, using hedge and highroad talk. Theatrical managers have now come to realize that many of us who may never hope to be duchesses are still swayed by this back to the soil movement. The humour of musical comedy grows more robust as the season wanes. It is broader, thicker and, to my mind, funnier. Comedy, like Antaeus, must keep at least a tiptoe on the earth. When the spirit of fun begins to sicken it is time that he should be hit severely with a bladder. Having been knocked down, he will rise refreshed.

All of which is preliminary to the expression of the opinion that Jim Barton, now playing at the Century in The Last Waltz, is the funniest clown who has appeared in New York this season. Mr. Barton was discovered in a burlesque show by some astute theatrical scout several seasons ago. Burlesque was several rungs higher in the ladder than his starting point, for his career included appearances in carnivals and the little shows which ply up and down some of the rivers, giving nightly performances on their boat whenever there is a cluster of light big enough to indicate a village. Jim Barton has been trained, therefore, in capturing the interest and attention of primitive and unsophisticated theatregoers. This training has encouraged him in zest and violence. It has impressed upon him the conception that the fundamental appeal to all sorts of people and all sorts of intelligences is rhythm. "When in doubt, dance" is his motto.

The Bravery of Burlesque

PRIMARILY he developed his dancing as something which should make people laugh.It was, and is, full of stunts and grotesque movements and surprising turns. But it has not remained just funny. Consciously or unconsciously he knows, just as Charlie Chaplin knows, that funny things must be savoured with something else to capture interest completely: And when you watch the antics of Barton and laugh there comes unexpectedly, every now and then, a sudden tightening of the emotions as you realize that some particular pose or movement is not funny at all, but a gorgeously beautiful picture. For instance, when Barton begins his skating dance the first reaction is one of amusement. There is a recognizable burlesque of the traditional stunts of the man on ice, but that is lost presently in the further realization that the thing is amazingly skilful and graceful. Again he follows a Spanish dancer with castanets and seems to depend upon nothing more than the easy laugh accorded to the imitator, but as he goes on it isn't just a burlesque. He has captured the whole spirit and rhythm of the dance.

THERE is, perhaps, something of hypocrisy and swank in taking the performance of Barton and seeming to imply, "Of courseI like this man because I see all sorts of things in his work that his old burlesque audiences never recognized". It is dishonest, too, because as a matter of fact I like exactly the same things which won his audiences in the old Columbia circuit. I have never been able to steel myself against the moment in which the comedian steps up behind the stout lady and slaps her resoundingly between the shoulder blades. Jim Barton is particularly good because he hits louder and harder than any other comedian I ever saw. But even for this liking a defense is possible. The influx of burlesque methods ought to have a thoroughly cleansing influence in American musical comedy. More refined entertainment has often been unpleasantly salacious, not because it was daring but because it was cowardly. Familiar stories of the smoking car and the barroom have been brought into Broadway theatres often enough, but in disguised form. 1 They have minced into the theatre. The appeal created by this form of humour has been never to the honest laugh but to the smirk. If I were a censor I think I would allow .a performer to say or do almost anything in the theatre if only he did it frankly and openly. The blue pencil ought to be used only against furtive things. You may not like smut, but it is never half so objectionable as shamefacedness. The best tonic I can think of for the hangdog school of musical comedy to which we have fast been drifting is the immediate importation to Broadway of fifty comedians exactly like Jim Barton. Of course, the only trouble is that the scouts would probably turn up with the report that there was not even one.

A New Comedian

STILL rumour is going about of at least one other. I am reliably informed that Bobby Clark of Peek-A-Boo is one of the funniest men of the year. Unfortunately I am not in a position to make a first hand report because on the night his show opened at the Columbia I was watching Mixed Marriage break into another theatre, or attending a revival of John Ferguson or something like that.

Accordingly, I missed the scene in which Bobby Clark tries to put his head into the lion's mouth. Clark must be a good comedian, because he sounds funny even when you get him at second or third hand in the form, "And then you see he says, 'You do it fine. You even smell like a lion. Take off the head now and we'll get along.' "

As it has been explained to me, Clark and the other comedian are hired by a circus because the trained lion has suddenly become too ill to perform. Clark's partner is to put on a lion's skin and pretend to be a lion while Clark goes through the usual stunts of the trainer, including the feat of putting his head into the lion's mouth. At the last minute the lion recovers and is wheeled out on to the stage in a big cage. Clark believes the animal is his partner in disguise and compliments him warmly oh the manner in which he roars. Finally, however, he becomes irritated when there is no response, except a roar, to his request, "Take off the head now and come on". After a second roar Clark remarks with no little pique, "Come on now, cut it out, you're not so good as ail that."

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What happens after that I don't know because the people who have been to the Columbia Theatre always leave you in doubt as to whether Clark actually goes into the lion's den or not. Presumably not, because later in the show, according to these reports, there is a drill by The World's Worst Zouaves in which Clark as the chief zouave whistles continually for new formations only to have nothing happen. Whether Clark is the originator of the material about the lion and the rest, or only the executor, I am not prepared to say. All the scouts talk as if he made it up as he went along, and whenever a comedian can bring about that state of mind there need be no doubt of his ability.

However, it is not possible to dismiss The Last Waltz merely by saying that Jim Barton is a marvellous. (lancing clown and let it go at that. The new show at the Century is the only serious rival which Sally has had all season. The Strauss waltzes are not much better than the pleasantly ingratiating tunes of Jerome Kern in the Ziegfeld production, but they are sung much better. Eleanor Painter is easily the best light opera prima donna New York has heard this year. In fact one must go further back than that to catch the faint echo of a comic opera star to compare with her. There are other good voices in the musical comedy field, but generally speaking the people with good voices don't know how to use them, and those that have mastered the business of singing have outlived their voices. But Miss Painter uses a fine voice with perfect style. It is one of those smooth voices without any little cubbyholes in it. Nor is there ever the suggestion, well known to musical comedy goers, that the prima donna .has begun to grit her teeth and pray because a high note is coming. Miss Painter's voice is one which proceeds from first to last without threats or persuasion. She does an entire performance on one winding. In addition to singing gorgeously, Miss Painter acts very well and dances, too. Although I have heard a good deal about one hundred percent people, Miss Painter is . the only one I have ever seen.

"Gold" O'erdusted

LOGICALLY it might be expected that Eugene O'Neill's Gold ought to receive the place at the top in any review of the month. It was expected that this new play would serve to wind up the season with a flourish; but there is no getting away from the fact that it is a disappointment. Some of it is almost his best, but from that high point it drops to other scenes which are not even O'Neill's fourth or fifth best. It seems to me that only the first and the fourth acts interested him much. Between these there is little apparent purpose, except to tie the acts together. The scheme of the play makes it necessary for the playwright to accomplish an enormous amount of exposition, and this he does painstakingly and clumsily.

There is zest in the first act which concerns the finding of the treasure. Here O'Neill appears to be having a week-end off in romance and enjoying his truancy from realism hugely. The treasure, to be sure, is only brass and junk, but it seems glamorous to the heat and thirst crazed sailors. The cook and the ship's boy, sceptics, are killed by the evil Kanaka sailor with the captain's connivance, though not by his command. Then a rescuing ship is sighted and the bodies and the treasure are buried.

With this promising start O'Neill finds himself hampered as soon as the next act begins at the Captain's home by the fact that it is necessary to tell several other characters in the play what happened on the island. And the audience, which knows, finds the retelling a strain on its patience. Nobody cares much what the captain's wife thinks of him, nor his daughter. These are two of the most conventional roles which O'Neill has ever written.

The last act revives interest mightily. In this the high point of the play is reached. We have watched a schooner sail away without the Captain to recover the treasure and we have been told that the ship has been lost. The evidence is indisputable, but still the old man will not believe. In the top room of his house, fashioned like a cabin, he waits for the return of the vessel with the chest of gold. So great is his belief and so powerful his delusion that for a moment his neurotic son is drawn under the spell. Standing by the captain, he thinks he sees the schooner sail into the harbour, and he thinks he hears the tramp of the sailors on the stairs, as they come up carrying the chest, even though there is no ship and no sailors and the treasure is at the bottom of the sea.

It is a somewhat convenient dramatic device thus to picture madness among the infectious ailments, although the theatre has already done as much for suicide, but it is also audacious and magnificent. When this particular act was given as a one-act play several seasons ago under the title Where the Cross Is Made O'Neill was still more audacious, and had the ghostly figures stalk across the stage in? full view of the audience. On second thought this has seemed to him a little too much. Now the scene is sharply broken by having the captain's daughter suddenly open the door. Hers were the steps heard upon the stage. No apparitions are seen. This seems to me overcautious. Insanity is a time-worn dramatic device which is not as effective as it used to be, but having adopted the device, an author might as well reap all the possible benefits. Having reached a gripping moment in the scene in which the boy is carried away by the intensity of his father's belief in the treasure, O'Neill might as well have held on to it a little longer. Now it ends abruptly and the old man dies with more than customary consideration for the necessity of a final curtain.

Some of the values of the play are lost by indifferent performances, and Willard Mack, who plays the role of the Captain, is quite evidently not just what O'Neill planned. Still this is a capital piece of acting. Mr. Mack has had endless experience in playing mounted policemen of Canada, outlaws, cracksmen of the better sort and indeed most the glamorous figures of adventure. At some time or other in his career he decided that they should all be Irish and he plays the Gloucester whaling captain with a strong brogue. He swaggers too much, and he remembers too many tricks and uses some of them. For instance, in the scene in which his wife weeps, Mack as the Captain comes up behind her and starts to put his hands on her shoulders. While they are still one-sixteenth of an inch away he thinks better of it and snatches them away as if from a stove top. But all this cannot conceal the fact that the man is an actor and likes his job. He puts his back and shoulders into the part and shows no sense of strain.

Somebody else might play the part with more finesse, but it would be hard to find a man who could put so much gusto into it. We doubt whether a more careful and finished performance would be half so exciting.