New Plays

Glory Hallelujah. Perhaps too much was expected of this strange tragedy. Word floated around that an extraordinary sensation was in store for the weary playgoers; wise folk behind the scenes averred that a great play had been written. The initial assembly expected to whoop with joy. Therefore when the play trailed away after a burning first act, they were desolate. Glory Hallelujah is a great deal better than most, but it commits the serious sin of going back on its promise.

An astronomer, so the authors narrate, has found a comet about to cross the face of the sun. The world will be plunged into a frozen darkness that will abolish all the living. The reaction to this horrible eventuality of a group of Bowery bums is the thesis. Some get religion and some get drunk. In the centre of it all is a little scrub girl on whose tortured mind the glory of dying and the majesty of immortality slowly burst. Then when the astronomer's mistake is published, she cannot endure life and kills herself. This part is played by June Walker with all the glow and mastery which she showed in Processional and The Glass Slipper. It is a magnificent performance in a play that now and then fingers the fringes of magnificence.

H.M.S. Pinafore. The Shuberts have done their best in this mass attraction. People who make a religion of Gilbert and Sullivan will tell you that it is certainly the biggest and one of the best presentations of the opera given in these parts for many seasons. It matters little that the satire was created to shame certain unsalty potentates in the British admiralty nearly half a century ago. The wit is still spry. Of the lyrics and the music, the yellowing files for 50 years are full of eulogy. There remains only the manner of the recreation. There is a noble, towering set; over a hundred chorus people in several hundred handsome gowns and uniforms; and a cast of notables including Marguerite Namara, Tom Burke, Jack Hazzard, William Danforth, Marion Green. And last, but by no means least, Fay Templeton. Miss Templeton emerges out of a luxurious and presumably peaceful retirement in Pittsburgh to play Little Buttercup. She weighs three times what she did when she was the queen of the old Weber and Fields music hall. The audience, boisterously affectionate in their greeting, agreed with the captain of the Pinafore that she was "a plump and pleasing person."

Beau Gallant. The author of this fable attempted to glorify the American gentleman. He chose a type of Gentleman that is dying out. His hero is a man who will not work and who tries to make an Art out of clothes, cuisine and calling cards. He goes broke and is terribly insulted by sheriffs and by well meaning friends who try to lend him money. In the background hovers, inevitably, a girl, to say nothing of a rich uncle from South America. Lionel Atwill does his very best to make a silk purse out of a stuffed shirt.

The Two Orphans. The theatre this season having had an extraordinary rush of revivals to the head, it was altogether proper that the current generation should witness The Two Orphans. It has indeed been said that a prisoner just released from Sing Sing after 20 years would perhaps feel his captivity a dream. For as he poked about the playbills for amusement he would find East Lynne, Pinafore, What Every Woman Knows, Cyrano de Bergerac, Ghosts and The Bells. Perhaps he would be a trifle puzzled by an unfamiliar upstart called Abie's Irish Rose.

Of all these none has been treated to a more star-spangled cast than The Two Orphans. Fay Bainter, Mary Nash, Florence Nash, Henrietta Grossman, Mrs. Thomas Whiffen, May Robson, Robert Loraine, Jose Ruben, Wilton Lackaye and Henry E. Dixey are occupied with its interpretation.