New Plays

Nancy Ann. The titular character is a young miss who, in spite of growing up with all the advantages of patrician society, does everything lefthanded. Those advantages include a quartet of berating aunts who are constantly trying to jerk her into a state of perfection. Their nagging accounts for Nancy Ann's state of perennial flutter.

Escaping from her home on the night of her coming-out party, the orphaned niece sets out on a stage career, inspired by her success in dramatic school. Her aunts had opposed such a life, solely because she belonged to one of the oldest New York families. She tackles a young actor-manager whom she has adored from afar, recites a lurid defamatory speech to convince him of her talent. It convinces him she's a blackmailer, and he telephones for the police. In the end she finds herself in the manager's arms.

Francine Larrimore, the star, saves the character from being a hybrid bud. She seems to range in age from eight to eighteen, according to the impulse of the moment. By turn she is petulant, frowsy, winning, pusillanimous, firm. But she fuses this all together with her indomitable histrionic spirit, and saves the part from being a teapot tempest of tears. Tom Nesbitt and Wallace Ford provide good shadows for the background, but the aunts are mere stalking horses.

The play is the Harvard prize winner for last year in Professor George Pierce Baker's so-called Workshop. The authoress, Miss Dorothy Heyward, resident of Charleston, S. C, has a gift for dovetailing into her work pretty little tricks of playwriting prestidigitation. But the first act in the aristocratic home is dull and stuffy, and suggests the awful thought that the drawing rooms around Harvard can't be such a much.

Alexander Woolcott: "... aroused instant suspicion that the others [in competition for the Harvard Prize] must have been pretty bad."

Heywood Broun: "Some discipline of the sternest sort should be applied to Miss Francine Larrimore. It seems probable that this young actress has a gift for the theatre, but she has made precious little of it in the last three seasons. Instead of working upon a faulty speech and improving it she has intensified it for the sake of comedy effects in cuteness. Miss Larrimore ought to be made to stay in after school."

Paradise Alley. This new musical comedy deals with a girl who makes an even greater success than did Nancy Ann merely by stepping on a stage and opening her mouth. She leaps full-blown with a golden voice from the slums of New York to a London revue, under the tutelage of a manager who is a very thinly disguised Weber & Fields comedian.

All the English aristocracy make a point of falling in love with her. But she spurns their Piccadilly peccadilloes for the honest, 100% American heart of a simple prizefighter who sings tenor with impunity. For further proof of the closeness to life of this show, consult the following: Check suit worn by the Krausmeyer manager, tuxedos and patent leather shoes worn by the reporters of great London dailies.

Carle Carlton has sought to have the mantle of his previous successes, Irene and Tangerine, descend on this production, but he has merely caught the lining. Helen Shipman twitters about with the airy caprice of a sparrow; Arthur West is an amusing prizefight trainer; but the chief asset is a chorus that seems willing to try anything not once, but several times.