The Stars of the Future

A Preliminary Forecast of the Plays and Players to Hold the Boards in 1943

ALEXANDER WOOLLCOTT

NOW is the time of year when the magazines and newspapers are full of tidings as to the great things that will be done in the season of 1923-24. The managers who have been vagabonding in Europe between the gambling rooms of Deauville and the money-order department of the American Express Company in Paris, now come beaming down the gangplanks, each with his mind evenly divided between the flask of Grande Marnier, hidden in his camera, and the nice wording of the statement he means to issue—the statement which will subtly suggest that he has thoughtfully studied all the worth-while theatrical productions from Hammersmith to Buda Pesth and has arranged the triumphant farewell American tour of every European star who can still walk. To the possible surprise of the Guitrys, it will be announced as usual that they are coming to New York this Fall. One of the younger managers, after nonchalantly announcing eighteen astounding plays for production before Christmas, will finally produce the first one in New Haven, go immediately into bankruptcy, and retire to Hot Springs for a fit of sulks.

Some fine May morning an ink-stained wretch along Park Row will become industrious and malevolent enough to compare a producer's record for the season with the dazzling schedule he had announced the preceding September. But, in the meantime, we shrewd old onlookers, too wise to believe even the most plausible forecasts for the season just ahead, might find it more amusing to look forward twenty years and speculate idly as to the plays and players that will then be seen along Broadway.

What pieces that we know today will be remembered then? Where will the theaters be, and what will they be like? Above all, who will be the John Barrymores and Jane Cowls of 1943?

Genius in the Loom of Time

OUT of the young folks whose names are just beginning to recur insistently in the playbills, out of the obscure beginners wondering now whether they might not better have gone in for preaching or general housework, must be chosen the leaders of the stage whose performances Heywood Broun, 3rd, will so severely review. The neophyte actress who has been lying awake for a week in an agony of fear lest the dull-witted critics should not recognize her extraordinary talent in delivering her one line—"No, ma'am, Mr. Trevelyan telephoned he wouldn't be home to dinner"— in tonight's new play and who will learn tomorrow that most of the critics arrived too late for this great scene of hers, this absurd young person, for all you know, will be the Lady Macbeth of two continents twenty years from now. Of course we shall say we had predicted it all along.

If, as it turns out, she is to be summoned to the great roles, it will be you and herself and, especially, Chance who will summon her. At least, we know that by fiat of no manager nor by the combined wealth and influence of all of them, can a Mrs. Fiske be made out of a sows ear. More than one minor Napoleon of the theater has in the storehouse the still unpaid-for scenery of a production that fell about his ears because he had tried to buy a little domestic peace by casting his wife or his daughter for the leading role.

Most of us recall the comically unsuccessful efforts of more than one manager to make a star out of his handsome and ambitious, but incompetent—let us say, consort. It cannot be done with electric lights and a very orgy of capital letters. A colossus of finance -may build a magnificent theater for an actress who has smiled on him. But there may not be enough money in Wall Street to persuade the public to sit in it and watch her try to act.

Dame Fortune as a Snob

A COURTESAN who has filled the newspapers from Los Angeles to Vienna with the victories of her beauty, and who has even enjoyed the semi-final cachet of watching a smitten youth blow out his brains because she was cold to him, would have to admit that the manager who tried to make a star of her on Broadway was somehow unable to award her that final decoration. At least, we know this of the stars of 1943—that in scanning the firmament for them and predicting the day and hour of their first shining, we need study only the natural forces of the theater.

We may count on their shining in spite of, rather than by decree of, the managers; for though the older critics, when short of copy, are still wont to dash off a few articles deploring the star system and shaking their heads over the folly of the managers in trying to force untrained young personal favorites on a reluctant public, they are ..writing absentmindedly. For the era is past when the late Charles Frohman considered that day wasted in which he did not emblazon a new name on the night sky of Broadway.

The Economic Prudence of Selection

AS a matter of fact, for counting-house reasons, the managers have of late years stubbornly resisted the yearnings of the players to see their names in big letters on the ash barrels. Thus, in the last decade, only two or three stars of the first magnitude have floated into our ken. You have only to look back, in the newspaper files and program books of 1903, to see that the great names of that day were for the most part the same great names that lead the playbills now. A Mansfield has gone, a Laurette Taylor has come. But, for the most part, there has been little change at the top in that great repertory company called Broadway. Which is another way of saying that it is time to scan the heavens for new portents, time for the call-boy to be learning new names.

Not that a good deal cannot happen in twenty years. Twenty years ago this month Jane Cowl was a school girl in Brooklyn and John Barrymore was a ne'er-do-well cartoonist who had been summoned to learn his first part in the play called Magda, which war. to open in Chicago in October. Anyone who had risen then and in sibylline accents predicted that 1923 would see them enthroned as the Hamlet and Juliet of their age, would have been laughed at with scorn and wonder.

(Continued on page 80)

THE STARS OF 1943

SIR DAVII) BURTON presents ROLAND YOUNG and HELEN HAYES in " OUI EST NON "

By Dr. SAMUEL SHIPMAN BURTON THEATER Central Park, West

MORRIS GEST bursts with pride in announcing

THE SIAMESE ART THEATER

(by arrangement with the Prince of Siam) Engagement positively limited to one performance Seats eight weeks in advance

THE BOWERY BURLESQUERS

in "MY BAD DREAM GIRL"

Hear Lilliun Lorraine Lawrence sing

" When Grandma Was a Boy " BELASCO THEATER

ETHEL BARRYMORE, 2nd in "ROMEO AND JULIET"

John Drew Devereaux as Itomeo John Coogan as Mercntio Ethel Barrymore as The Nurse 500th performance, Wednesday night FISKE THEATER

WILLIAM A. BRADY, JR. presents MISS MARGALO GILLMORE in " THE DEAR DUCHESS "

By ZOE AKINS MORNINGSIDE THEATER

ELSIE JANIS and Her Gang in " ON TO TOKIO "

Mrs. JANIS, mere, will positively not appear at every performance

VAN CORTLANDT OPERA HOUSE

Charles Frohman, Inc.

(MICHAEL GOLDREYER, Director) offers LESLIE HOWARD in John Drinkwater's new historical drama

" WARREN G. HARDING »

with Danville Maddem and Patricia Ziegfeld EMPIRE THEATER Wednesday night

JOE COOK and ED WYNN in " THE WOWS of 1943 "

Opening postponed until Saturday (Last Winter's Tickets as good as ever)

JEROME PARK THEATER

MUNICIPAL THEATER KATHARINE CORNELL and

DONALD GALLAHER in "ANTONY and CLEOPATRA"

JOAN STRANGE in " PETER PAN "

BARRYMORE THEATER Opposite Grant's Tomb

MILTON SHUBERT presents PEGGY WOOD in " HIS'N and HER'N "

By JOHN V. A. WEAVER

THE THEATER GUILD presents " THE FIRST YEAR "

By SIR FRANK CRAVEN

GUILD THEATER West 57th Street

POCKET THEATER

(127)4 East 96th Street-Three (lights up)

Special Matinees of

"DA"

By ST. JOHN ERVINE with (and in spite of) Augustin Duncan Both Seats on sale at the Box Office

(Continued front page 37)

THAT is because it is a universal habit among playgoers to assume that the art of acting is on the wane and that next generation will have to worry along without any players at all. Ask any old man and he will tell you that they do not have snowstorms and tragediennes the way they used to when he was a boy. Go back stage yourself and try the youngsters over on your prophetic soul. You will find yourself drifting to the conclusion that the theater of 1943 would better not attempt anything so ambitious as the Shakespearean tragedies. Who, with Barrymore and Cowl retired gloomy magnificence, could undertake them?

Yet, for all you know, the property man's freckle faced urchin whom you never noticed at all as he shot craps the alley, may be the John Barrymore the new day, and the tousle-headed child asleep there in the corner of the dressing room may emerge in beauty and significance as the loveliest Juliet all.

All of which hot-weather speculation is lazily colored by the sentimental suggestion that somewhere, out of humble obscurity, the Stars of Tomorrow will emerge. It is true that in twenty years the names of Mrs. Fiske, George Arliss, William Gillette, Otis Skinner, Henry Miller, Lionel Barrvmore, E. H. Sothcrn, Julia Marlowe, William Faversham, Margaret Anglin, Cyril Maude and the like will all have vanished from the billboards. But the names which whistling Time will have cheerfully passed over— theirs are already familiar enough.

You can name them. Gonsider such actors as Leslie Howard, McKay Morris, Roland Young, Donald Gallaher, Henry Hull, Glenn Hunter, Sidney Blackmer, Gareth Hughes, Gregory Kelly, Ben Ami, Joseph Schildkraut and Robert Ames, And such actresses as Alice Brady, Helen Menken, Katharine Cornell, Winifred Lenihan, Helen Hayes, Lenore Ulric, Margalo Gillmore, Peggy Wood, Pauline Lord and Genevieve Tobin. In twenty years some of these will have gained in stature. Some will have disappeared from view. But among them, surely, are the leaders of Tomorrow's theater.

If you will remember, some morning in 1943, to examine the list of plays and players offered to you for that night, you will note that the emblazoned names were all included in the penultimate paragraph which dear old Mr. Woollcott ("I wonder what ever became of him!") published in Vanity Fair 'way back in 1923. In that paragraph he ventured to forecast the stars of 1943—1943, when Laurette Taylor and Jane Cowl and Ethel Barrymore will be the "grand old ladies" of the American Stage.