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The Theatre
George Jean Nathan
THE THEATRE RETURNS.—That, viewed critically, the American theatre has been benefited enormously by the withdrawal from its audience body of the considerable element possessed of a motion picture taste and intelligence is every day becoming more benignly apparent. The audience, true enough, is still hardly a stunning congress of luminaries, but that it is immensely superior to what it was when it embraced the now largely expatriated film component is clearly reflected in the quality of the plays it favors and to which, by its endorsement, it brings prosperity. It is a fact not lost upon any observant student of the theatre that not only has every genuinely successful play thus far this season shown at least some degree of merit, but that even a number of the more dismal failures have, from the critical point of view, revealed a greater share of essential intelligence than some of the biggest successes of the years when the presently absent movie customers figured conspicuously in the auditoriums. The producers have had to change their standards or go bankrupt.
What is most significant about the majority of plays that the newer audience acclaims with its patronage is not only a very greatly increased integrity in the contemplation of subject matter but a suggestion of sound literary quality. The box-office successes of other years, when the prejudices of the movie taste still operated so widely in the audience, were most often intrinsically bogus articles of drama and with approximately as much literary flavor as a novel by Edgar Wallace. Such prosperous plays as Mourning Becomes Electra, The Barretts of Wimpole Street, The Left Bank, The Animal Kingdom, Brief Moment and even Cynara and Reunion in Vienna are plainly of a mind and wit and literacy uncommon in the American theatre of yesterday. And, as I have noted, it remains a readily perceptible truth that even such failures of the present season as He, The Breadwinner, Payment Deferred, The House of Connelly, Lean Harvest, The Sex Fable, The Lady with a Lamp, After All and a number of others were just about ten times worthier on most critical counts than such big successes of some six and seven years ago as Polly Preferred, Ladies of the Evening, Dancing Mothers, Cobra, The Ner-. vous Wreck, White Cargo, Abie's Irish Rose and Lawful Larceny.
All this, of course, is very acceptable news to those of us whose profession it has been for many years to write irritating essays on the immemorial subject, "What's Wrong with the Theatre", and, in the writing, to earn for ourselves the impetiginous distinction of being chronic faultfinders. I do not, surely, go so far as to say that the subject of our old essays is now buried finally in the ashcan, but it does begin to look as if the American theatre was at last on the way to coming into its own. Its producers are now the humble subjects of its improved and demanding audiences, where once the situation was turned about and taken advantage of by the producers. Its playwrights must toe the mark or perish in Hollywood. It has become the theatre of the intelligent minority and only by so becoming may any theatre get within hailing distance of an art. The moving pictures have done their duty and fulfilled nobly their purpose. They have proved to be the most constructive critical force that the theatre has known in our time. They have isolated and sequestered their own shallow and imbecile audiences—audiences that once over-ran and befouled the theatre—and so have left the theatre free to do its honest best for the residuum of the white race.
THE NEW MUSIC SHOW.—While we are thus gayly splashing around in the sarsaparilla of optimism and doubtless causing most of our old customers perplexedly to scratch their heads over the spectacle, we may observe that even the music show stage has taken some pretty strides forward. It would probably be too much to argue that the improvement in this quarter is similarly due to the vanishing from the audience personnel of its old film quota, but even that contention might occur to one who has regarded the kind of music show presentations currently made in the big movie theatres and that meet with the clamorous endorsement of such theatres' patrons. A look at the presentations in the Paramount, Roxy, Capitol and other such movie palaces in the larger cities should be sufficient to persuade us that what present-day movie audiences most greatly admire is exactly the kind of music show stuff that has fortunately disappeared from most of the stages of our other theatres and that harks back at least a dozen or more years. In point of fact, aside from a new radio favorite or two, these presentations are made up entirely of materials long discarded by other music show stages: stale toe dancers, small-time vaudeville clog dancers, ballets depicting the four seasons, lugubrious love duets in purple-lighted rose arbors, sister acts grouped around a piano, straight acrobats and all other such items long since unceremoniously dumped out of the shows in the musical-legitimate theatres. Yet the movie mobs flock to the movie cathedrals to behold them and to revel in them—and so leave the thitherward stages free for something more respectable.
A sample of the newer dispensation on our music show stage is to be had in Of Thee I Sing, a satirical lampoon of American politics and by all odds the best entertainment of its species that the native stage has disclosed. Chief credit for it goes to the MM. Kaufman and Ryskind, who are responsible for the book, and to Ira Gershwin, who contributed the lyrics. George Gershwin's music, though here and there moderately skilful, is the least significant element in the proceedings; it is, as a matter of fact, small shakes. The exhibition in the aggregate, however, is a far cry from the kind of thing that hitherto has occupied local platforms.
Revues aside, the American music show stage has, season upon season, followed more or less routine paths. The EighteenNineties were devoted for the most part to endless repetitions of the Wang and Panjandrum order, subject only to a change in the name of the mythical land of their setting and the manner of the star comedians' first entrance. When ingenuity in this direction had exhausted itself and the comedians found that they could no longer stimulate audiences becoming on on an elephant or by falling down a collapsible flight of steps or by swinging in on a rope attached to a balloon, as in The Wizard of the Nile, someone thought up the great idea of putting a brass band on the stage, as in El Capitan, and for years thereafter hardly a show was safe from a white and gold uniformed sextette that blared out the march tune of the show at intervals during the evening. With the exception of Frank Baum's The Wizard of Oz, produced at the dawn of the Nineteen-Hundreds, no even relatively original music show found its way to the American tune stage. The early Nineteen-Hundreds, in turn, so far as the native music show went, were given over almost wholly to a succession of books about romantic gipsies and saucy milliners' apprentices or to adaptations offering opportunities for German dialect comedians. Nor was the mythical kingdom hokum yet entirely discarded, even the uncommonly gifted George Ade falling back upon it in his paraphrases, The Sultan of Sulu and The Sho-Gun—the latter containing the first faint symptoms of satire in American musical comedy. In all this era, only Babes in Toyland—like The Wizard of Oz fundamentally a nursery tale —departed the prevailing stencil.
Considering the American music show alone and leaving aside such exhibits in the way of comic opera as the works of Reginald De Koven, the panorama of the Nineties and early Nineteen-Hundreds disclosed mainly cut-outs from the same general pattern.
Woodland, its idea derived broadly from Aristophanes' Birds, brought a single new note to the latter period, the stages being chiefly occupied by imitations of foreign models. Henry Biossom, in The Yankee Consul, made a brave effort to break away from the epidemic rubber-stamps, and subsequently, taking over a Richard Harding Davis plot, tried to get somewhere with The Yankee Tourist, but for all his efforts what remained under the surface of the shows was much the same old thing. It was left for George M. Cohan, who was destined to change so much of the current of popular American drama, to change as well the current of the American music show, and in the years that followed the farce or farce-comedy with tunes added became the vogue. But this trace of originality was not to last long. Without Cohan's gift, the bookmakers were soon to return to what was at bottom simply a reworking of the old pseudo-romantic materials of twenty years before: the proud princess in love with the humble naval lieutenant, the little Canadian soprano separated from her Royal Mounted hero, the scapegrace English tenor in the tropics torn between bis passion for the dusky hula dancer and his conventional love for the girl back home who confused the situation by arriving on the boat at the end of the first act, the young officer in the Foreign Legion who found that his sweetheart had married his cousin while he was in Africa but, with romantic good fortune, had not consummated the marriage, and so on. All of these revampings included the comedian of the Nineties who duly came on at intervals of twenty minutes wearing a funny hat and at intervals of ten wiping off his mouth after he kissed a lady's hand, and who differed only from his long-ago predecessors by making jokes about Henry Ford and Texas Guinan instead of about Coxey and Bryan. What variety the music show stage vouchsafed was confined solely to books made out of bad plays which had bored everyone to death when they were presented on the dramatic stage.
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This was the situation—indeed, to a noticeable extent, still is—on the local stage. But a few years ago there came the first gusts of a wind that promise a clearing away of the dead leaves. The same men who have now written Of Thee I Sing were responsible for it. It was in their show, Strike Up the Band, that a new vital, healthy and beautifully humorous satire and travesty began critically to rear its tail upon the old American musical comedy scene. It was in that show that the seed which has flowered so handsomely in their latest effort was sown. Of Strike Up the Band, with its lampoon of big business and war, I need not treat; it is doubtless still fresh in the memory of playgoers. But a few words may be in order as to the exhibit currently on view at the Music Box.
That the show's god-fathers were Gilbert and Sullivan is too obvious to be brought again to notice. That the first revue which George Cohan wrote for the theatre some dozen or more years ago was not without its measure of inspiration is likewise apparent. And that the ghost of the Charles H. Hoyt of A Texas Steer and, to a lesser degree, of A Milk White Flag, lurks in the wings is no less apparent. But that the show, once the ghostly genealogy is recorded, is its authors' own and stands very handsomely on its own feet is even more apparent. It is American to the backbone; it is founded upon an original perception and wit; it makes droll mock of its own hokum; it is, in its moments of wildest burlesque, still a toe planted sharply and with tonic effect in the national posterior; it is, in short, the most ingenious and the most hilariously acute ironic slapstick yet applied to a slice of the American national idiosyncrasy. There are, it is readily to be admitted, one or two elements in it that are not without music show whiskers—such sad puns, for example, as "the tooth, the whole tooth and nothing but the tooth" and such numbers as the parade of the girls in military uniforms up and down a flight of stairs—but for each of these there are gallons of antidote in the shape of some of the most biting and guffaw-brewing humor that has yet shaken the ceiling in the native music show theatre. I believe that it is safe to predict that, with the birth of this show, the American music show stage has entered upon what will eventually turn out to be a new and independent life.
UNFOUNDED REPUTATIONS.—One of the critical mysteries that has long entertained me is the literary and dramatic reputation of Romain Holland. With the presentation in the local theatre last month of still another of his plays, Wolves, the pretensions of the man. together with the whale oil with which they have been generously massaged by various European critics, were betrayed anew. A careful contemplation of the sum total of his dramatic labor recalls the words written of his fellow-countryman and fellow-dramatist, Brieux, by John Palmer during his Saturday Review incumbency. "M. Brieux," wrote Palmer, "burns. In spite of the clumsiness with which he presents his doctrine; in spite of the aridity of his speech, his words all dead as door nails in a mortuary; in spite of his lapses of imagination; in spite of his constitutional inability to marshal his evidence to good advantage, or to drive his points logically into our heads, or to convey interest or emotion into our hearts—in spite of all this, M. Brieux commands our respect. He has that supreme dignity which only a thoroughly stupid person can have in the highest degree. His is a ferocious and unassailable determination to be thoroughly in earnest. The only argument that survives a moment's criticism of any one of the plays of M. Brieux is the argument that M. Brieux himself solemnly feels what he is unable intelligibly to express; and, since mankind in bulk is always readier to attend to some one who believes than to some one who explains, being readier to fall under the spell of a really stupid man who blunders than under that of a really clever man who keeps his head, M. Brieux is today"—I need not quote further; the estimation in which Brieux is held even today in many quarters is sufficiently known.
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While Mr. Palmer's animadversions do not apply with full fairness to Rolland—nor to Brieux, for that matter —they apply in considerable part. Like Brieux, though not a stupid man, he burns, like a sore toe. Like Brieux in many of his plays, he is clumsy in the presentation of his doctrine; his words, if not dead as door nails in a mortuary, are at least often theatrically rusty; he so stacks and overemotionalizes his evidence that he deletes it of persuasiveness; he has a specious dignity; he is ferocious in his earnestness; and he believes what he himself solemnly feels with such passionate intensity that a certain amount of that passionate intensity, if not its inspirational source, is communicated to the more inflammable and less reflective auditor. He is, with Brieux, the premier soap-box playwright of the modern stage—and the biggest con man in the modern drama. His shells are the husks of French Revolutionary tracts, and the tricky little pea with which he deceives the come-ons is that cliche of rabble-rousers and mob politicians since first the world began: the brotherhood of man hooey.
Some time ago I wrote of Rolland, "Playwrights like him take for the skeletons of their plays the stalest of grease-paint plots and seek to distract attention from their antiquity by embroidering them with the species of writing that is called literary by such critics as imagine that when a man of letters fails to write dramatic dialogue what he has written must, by an arbitrary process of elimination, inevitably be literature. Rolland writes neither drama nor literature, but only a pretentious imitation of both." That verdict, so far as my personal opinion goes, still stands.
While engaging a solo dinner before going to the latest Rolland exhibit, I read a play dealing with a period of French history and here and there suggestive of the Rollandian theme that strikes me as being—though its author is a novice in drama—very considerably superior to anything that Rolland has written. Its author—we live, surely, in a world full of oddities —is none other than Benito Mussolini working in collaboration with one Forzano; its title is The Hundred Days; and it is, it seems to me, one of the best plays treating of the events leading up to the debacle of Napoleon, to say nothing of a study of Napoleon himself, of the men who surrounded him and of the thunder-rumble of the times, that has come to my notice. Plays about Napoleon, save they be of the comedy species of Madame SansGene or of the witty contour of A Man of Destiny, are, of course, most often dull going in the modern theatre. Even when they are set to music, as in the charming The Purple Road, they hardly succeed in capturing the Anglo-American public fancy. Why this should be, I am not one to know, unless it is that when you have seen one of them you have pretty well seen them all. They amount, in sum, to little more than a little actor with a big belly and with a curl in the middle of his forehead who, even when the play is good, is still always painfully an actor grotesque in the Napoleonic role and who, when the play is bad, is terrible. Napoleonic plays are probably better read than seen.
Mussolini's play, nevertheless, might make a more satisfactory theatrical evening than most, if for no other reason than that it takes Napoleon out of the taxidermist and Madame Tussaud theatrical catalogue and humanizes him. More, the drama into which the character is set is handled without most of the usual fireworks; it is manoeuvred calmly, intelligently and with an excellent sense of the theatre; it has several episodes of sound emotion; and it provides, in sharp dramatic outline, a comprehensive and sometimes brilliant evocation of its historical period. Being familiar with The Cardinal's Mistress, Mussolini's antecedent endeavor in the novel form, I confess that I picked up the play thinking to let the waiter take it away with the soup, or certainly with the remains of the timbale de volaille. But it continued to hold my attention not only through the cotelctte de Chevreuil, the poire a la Richelieu and the laitues au jus, but throitgh the delicieux aux noisettes, the cheese and the coffee, and the Corona to boot. Mussolini has made a surprisingly good job of his first attempt at playwriting. Now it's Hoover's turn.
Addenda.—The Animal Kingdom, by Philip Barry, is an intelligently written and entertaining comedy, superior to anything else that the author has done. . . . Distant Drums, by Dan Totheroh, I can see nothing in, despite commendable striving. . . . Whistling in the Dark, by the MM. Gross and Carpenter, is an amusing melodramatic vaudeville. . . . Jewel Robbery, derived from the Hungarian, is tripe Hollywood-bound. . . . The Devil Passes, by Benn W. Levy, belongs to the theatre of fifteen years ago. ... So much until next month.
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