New Plays

The Beaten Track. If you are interested in Welsh pronunciations this piece will provide varied and steady amusement. Otherwise it is a rather gloomy evening.

The central figure of The Beaten Track is an old woman, who exists valiantly all through the play until she is made happy by the birth of a grandchild down the road. This part is excellently played by Eleanor Daniels.

Port o' London. Henry Miller at one time was energetically interested in the production of this play. It promised therefore to be interesting. He withdrew, perhaps because the play was not so good as he expected. It remains one of those middling adventures in the theatre, beautifully played but not particularly important.

Basil Rathbone and Alison Skipworth are the commendable performers. The former plays a limping beggar with artistic tendencies, and the latter a harsh-voiced female renting cheap lodgings by the London docks. The beggar falls in love with a vagrant halfbreed and loses her to a rugged sailor man.

The Jay Walker. Olga Printzlau, who writes movie scenarios, has written one for the stage. It is all about a pair of lovers, an aged mother and an erring wife. It is severely uninteresting and rather badly played.

Lulu Belle. Lenore Ulric, having patched up her troubles with David Belasco, has returned in a play of his management about a blackamoor Carmen. It is a rampant study in heartlessness, teeming with lost tempers and epithets. If you do not gag at the spectacle of a Negress courtesan with a white lover, Lulu Belle will not, after some of the lurid entertainments that have come this way recently, seem offensive.

Opposite Miss Ulric, Henry Hull gives a fine performance as the hesitant barber (colored also) who leaves his family and his business to follow the flaming trail of Lulu Belle. She loves him for a while and later leaves him. He knifes his huge successor, a Negro prizefighter, and goes to Sing Sing. In the last act he returns to kill her in her gaudy Paris apartment whither she has been transported by a French Vicomte.

Mr. Belasco has made the production with all his uncanny supremacy in detail. In a company of several score, most of the actors are colored, though all the important parts are taken by white performers in tan paint. The play is crude and at times fearfully exciting. Probably it is not a momentous contribution to current dramatic literature.

Miss Ulric is the centre, ceaselessly and spectacularly. She has a fist fight, dances a devastating Charleston, and battles brutally for her life at the end. Her strange harsh voice and her explosive, flame-colored charm fit the part thoroughly. She is Lulu Belle, and Lulu Belle is, granting the brilliant production and the remarkable performance of Mr. Hull, completely Lenore Ulric.