The Theatre

George Jean Nathan

GILBERT AND SULLIVAN.—The D'Oyly Carte Opera Company from the Savoy Theatre, London, is infinitely superior in its presentations of Gilbert and Sullivan to the local companies that have been performing the twain hereabouts in recent years. This fact has persuaded the enraptured New York critical gentlemen to confound the aforesaid unmistakable superiority with absolute perfection, to the glee of the management if not altogether to the substantiality of criticism. In its first two performances of The Gondoliers, for example, for all its expertness in certain other directions, part of the company sang fully half the entire first act off-key. Put it down to nervousness, if you will,—the engagement opened with that exhibit—it nonetheless remains that the troupe was on this occasion, though proclaimed as an unparalleled nonesuch by the reviewers, distinctly and decidedly faulty.

In the way of stage lighting, furthermore, the D'Oyly Carte productions, almost ail of them, are in something closely approaching the amateur class. In several of the presentations, the stage is here and there permitted to linger in such half-light and shadow that effect after effect is lost. Again, the articulation and pronunciation, so uniformly eulogized by the local reviewers, is often uneven, as may readily be verified by giving ear to the utterance of, say, Mr. Sydney Granville (otherwise a meritorious performer) and comparing it with that of various other members of the company.

Yet again, in certain of the operettas Mr. Martyn Green, an important member of the aggregation, is allowed to indulge himself in a vaudeville waggery that periodically takes the edge off a sound and true rendition of the Gilbert line. Still again, there is intermittently an overdose of mugging and general facial gymnastics—observe the performances of the Messrs. Dean and Fancourt—that is anything but consoling.

In a word, the D'Oyly Carte Company is a very good one, but it falls considerably short of the indefectibility hospitably attributed to it by the American press.

The chief bore of all Gilbert and Sullivan revivals is, of course, the audience; and the audiences at those of the D'Oyly Carte Company have been no exception to the rule. Allowing all the great virtue to Gilbert that was unquestionably his, it still takes an epizootic hypocrite to pretend that many of his quips and jests are not, in this day and age, woefully frayed and even discommodiously tiresome. Yet the fraudulent old Savoyards who pop out of hiding every time anything by Gilbert and Sullivan is produced still profess, with loud, mechanical guffaws, to find them too overwhelmingly comical for comfort, and rend the auditorium air with their strained and suspect responses. When, for example, Don Alhambra is mistaken for an undertaker because he is dressed in black, when Gianetta dumb-shows mal de mer, when the Duke plays elaborately with the word soupgon, when Giuseppe observes, "My ideas of politeness are confined to taking off my hat to my passengers when they tip me", the Duchess replies, "That's all very well, but it is not enough," and Giuseppe comes back with, "I'll take off anything else in reason"—when, under such melancholy circumstances, only some particularly senescent Rip Van Winkle could so much as dredge up a faint smile and we yet hear a present-day audience shout its head off in unrestrained mirth, there is obviously nothing left for us but to conclude that we are sitting in the midst of a lot of outrageously posturing fakers. And what was true in this instance of The Gondoliers was equally true of the audiences at the other revivals, including specifically The Pirates of Penzance, The Mikado, and Iolanthe.

VARIOUS EARLY PLAYS.— With much better news definitely awaiting us in the weeks to come, the early period of the season disclosed nothing that called upon the higher cerebrations of criticism. I display, in evidence, several lovely specimens. First, Lady Jane, by the H. M. Harwood who did fairly well several seasons back in Cynara. In this latest exhibit, known in London by the much more pointedly ironic title, The Old Folks at Home, the playwright has endeavored to build a three-act play consuming a presumably intelligent audience's valuable two hours around the hoary French maxim that a successful marriage is often preserved by an unsuccessful infidelity. While it is, of course, perfectly true that any number of very excellent plays have been built from even less—and from something equally stale— it so happens that the men who have written them have been gifted with the talent of either gay or sober intellectual and emotional embroidery and have used the trite basic springboard merely as a man uses a razor strop. In Mr. Harwood's case, however, all that remains when the audience finally fishes up its hat and coat is the venerable epigram, still unadorned and stark naked.

Mr. Harwood, in this instance, has not only written a lot of actors instead of characters, but actors who, pretending vainly to be human beings, give out the impression through the entire evening that a stage director is hiding under every chair, table and bed and whispering directions to them. In addition, the play might very nicely have been called The Sutro Follies of 1898, for it is in substance little more than a revue of the materials that used to make up the standard fashionable British comedy before Shaw and his successors derided it out of the London theatrical picture. The scene on the moonlit boudoir balcony with the lovers in adjoining bedrooms and the nightingale water-whistle blown allusively by a stagehand, the wife who pretends that it was she who was in her daughter-in-law's room all the while in order to confound a potential blackmailer who has caught sight of the lover on the balcony, the scene wherein a drunken young swain locks the bedroom door on a young woman who has coquettishly led him on and enters into the customary, never-finished rape business, the doddering but gentle and understanding old scientist husband (he experiments with bugs and lizards in this case instead of with butterflies ) who allows his wife to believe that he does not suspect her infatuation for the friend of the family (who is duly off to India in the last act)—all are here on tap again. And, with them, a full number of equally familiar stage types, episodes and lines. Miss Frances Starr occupies the role played in London by Miss Marie Tempest. Stressing the tender rather than the lighter note, she contributes a performance that, while eminently satisfactory on its own, hardly vouchsafes to the play itself the Tempest bounce which it so badly needs, but which wouldn't help it to interest one critic, at least. Tight Britches, originally the work of Hubert Hayes, a fireman in the Central Fire Station in Asheville, North Carolina, and dealing with characters for the most part Hayes' mountaineer kinsfolk, has been taken in hand by John Taintor Foote, rewritten, and done up for the Broadway trade. My informational outpost in the Carolinas, usually trustworthy, persuades me to believe that, whatever the virtues or the defects of the original manuscript (it was played very successfully in various sections of the South), it at least enjoyed a sharp, if crude, honesty and color, any trace of which I personally have failed to discern in the revamped New York version.

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In Too Many Boats, based on a novel by C. L. Clifford, we engaged the kind of military-post whangdoodle that used to inflame the interest of servant girls back in the Captain Charles King era. Owen Davis, who did the dramatization, seemed to imagine that the way to write an up-tothe-minute play was to sprinkle the dialogue with as many bitches, bastards and nuts as possible. It was all very sadly funny.

Skipping blithely—and politely—past such obvious showshop stuff as Otto Indig's The Bride of Torozko and the MM. Lothar's and Adler's The Red Cat, we come to Elmer Rice's Judgment Day. Here, because of the merit of certain of Mr. Rice's performances in the past, we fear we must indulge in the impoliteness that is imposed upon criticism when it is offended by uncommonly shoddy work done by a hitherto often qualified dramatist. In this latest play of his, to put it bluntly and briefly, Mr. Rice has written, with a perfectly straight face and out of the gravity of his intellect and the deep emotion of his heart, what amounts in sum to nothing more than an unwittingly comical burlesque show. Flaming with passion against the evils of certain dictatorships and the political and judicial corruptions which bloom therefrom, he succeeds only, after two hours of loud melodramatic shouting, in striking a small, flickering match on his trouser seat. I appreciate that this is not what is regarded as dignified criticism, but take my word for it that it is quite dignified enough for the material under its consideration. It is also, incidentally, sufficiently elaborate.

■ MUSICAL SHOWS.—In the last three or four years it has been almost impossible to find a musical show of the general revue stamp that has not opened the evening either with a number in which the chorus girls chant a facetious lyric informing the audience of the standard music show items that will not figure in the subsequent performance, or with one in which the standard characters of such a show—juvenile, comedian, sister act, hoofer, crooner, etc.—do not come out one by one and lightly ridicule their own banality.

In the first instance, the hope, patently, is that the audience will subsequently imagine that it sees novelty that is more often than not non-existent, and, in the second, that it will be so disarmed and won by the charming (if obligatorily fraudulent) frankness of the authors that it will remit its otherwise possibly harsh judgment. The author's good luck in both cases lies in the circumstance that hardly anyone ever gets to a music show in time to hear the opening number, with the result that audiences are not prejudiced by the rank staleness of these prefatory dodges and take what the evening offers, quite simply, for better or worse.

Of the various shows that have introduced the new season, the Messrs. Shuberts' Life Begins at 8:40, despite the fact that it begins in much the established manner referred to, is by all odds the best.

(Mr. Nathan's Theatrical Check List on Page 74)