New Plays

Ziegfeld Follies. The general impression from the current revue is something like this:

Colorful ranch scene, with Lupino Lane, English comedian, blown through the stage floor and doing some eccentric comedy with Tom ]Lewis, in shooting raiment from off a girl.

Will Rogers as a rural Senator in Washington.

Lupino Lane and Ann Pennington in a sprightly Bimini dance, with the Tiller girls kicking higher than ever.

Will Rogers in a skit on Congressional investigations.

Striking Ben Ali Haggin tableau, with Evelyn Law and Lina Basquette killing dull care with more dances.

Will Rogers throwing ropes.

Uproarious comedy about the piano next door, with Lane and Edna Leedom bounding and bawling in it.

Will Rogers.

Of course, there is the customary sumptuous offering of girls, arrayed and arranged with all the extravagant care of a window display. There are tuneful revivals by Irving Fisher of Victor Herbert hits, including the quaint march of the soldiers from Babes in Toyland, and novelties such as the Tiller Girls dancing skilfully in prosphorescent lights as they skip rope--while one makes private bets as to whether the ropes will snarl up. But the general feeling is that Ziegfeld could present a somewhat better show, if Will Rogers would let him.

Shooting Shadows. A comely lady and her husband have designs upon the pocketbook of the inevitable handsome millionaire. She falls in love with him. Can she go through with the blackmail scheme? Oh, dear, no! Following a series of un-bewildering circumstances, the millionaire fires a shot. That starts things going. The "mellow" drama gets a bit overripe and oozes "gooily" about the stage. The audience becomes pained when it ought to laugh, laughs when it ought to quake with fear. Needless to say the lovers are eventually left free to thrill one another with unrestricted mush without further discomfiting the audience.

Percy Hammond: ". . . It is a terrible, childish, discouraging mess. Summer has come."

The Blue Bandanna. Hitherto, young Sidney Blackmer in his plays has been considered as working under wraps. His voice has been subdued, he has seemed as though weighed down under affairs of state. Now in his latest thriller he is actually working under wraps. He bears around with him probably the largest wardrobe in circulation on the stage. He has so many costumes they amount to a supporting company.

Yet he is not smothered under this burden. Curiously enough, flinging on and off garments for the rapid changes required by his dual role seems to arouse him. Compared to his earlier, discreetly-modulated nuances, his voice rings out with a clarion call. His acting is much more virile, he seems stimulated by his snappy-clothes-for-mystery-men.

Mr. Blackmer seems to have been led to assert himself in order to energize this new play. A mystery melodrama by one Hubert Osborne, it is the direct antithesis of the pieces in which Blaekmer has lately been appearing, most of which have been decorously whispered behind the hand.

The action is based on the complications resulting when a wealthy clubman happens to resemble a double-dyed crook. The star, darting in and out of both roles with versatility, droops his mouth and alters his voice to distinguish the two characters for the benefit of the audience. Jewelry is stolen, the wrong man is nabbed, everything is cleared up with the help of a sweet young girl detective, played by Vivienne Osborne in the charming manner of a Vassar undergraduate.

But Blackmer's repertoire of modish suits is a whole show in itself.

Her Way Out. The heroine (Beatrice Terry--niece of Ellen) has been, in her earlier phases, a demimondaine, running a house of ill-repute in New Orleans, but only doing so, we are led to believe, because no other honest work offered. Renouncing that life, this mysterious woman of apparent breeding takes charge of a fashionable salon in Washington through which certain predatory interests seek to make Congress dizzy in its judgment.

When the charming hostess meets vigorous, upstanding Senator Norcross (Edward Arnold), representing the militant farm bloc of the West, her fascination induces him to give up his bill to nationalize the railroads. But she makes the fatal mistake of falling in love with him. Forced by his proposal of marriage to relieve her troubled conscience by disclosing her past, she does so via a vivid flashback of the cinema brand. Here she is shown shooting down a white slave procurer to save an innocent country-girl from the usual fate worse than death. Her senatorial lover, faced with marrying her and losing his career, insists on marriage, but she is about to solve that problem with a powder, when-

Well, when the cast interposes. The company, producing this play on the cooperative system, raised their voices during rehearsal for a happy ending. The author also prepared a compromise ending, in which a mortal heart attack relieved the heroine of her problem. All three finishes were played at the dress rehearsal before an invited audience, which chose the forced happy ending --pprobably for variety. It was so ordered on the opening night.

Try it with Alice. A childlike, paltry attempt to make a hero out of a female impersonator. It is set half a century hence, when Congress is represented as having passed a law making marriage compulsory, and making this pseudo-farce permissible. Two young men, to evade the law, go through a marriage with one of them posing as a woman, and-- But why go on? The play does, but a review can always stop. One Allen Leiber, a brother of the famed Shakespearean actor, Fritz Leiber, wrote the piece. That only shows what little influence Shakespeare really has today.