New Plays

Pomeroy's Past. Clare Kummer can balance the feather of wit on the foolish nose of her comedies just about as well as anybody in America. This latest of her all too infrequent writings is powdered with agreeable derision and encumbered with an incredibly heavy last act. If you examine it meticulously you will probably find that the other acts are not too effective. For the sake of the numerous excruciating lines you will waive this examination. Pomeroy's Past is an entertainment of major delight in the conversation. Otherwise it does not matter much.

The adoption of orphan twins by two worthy bachelors is the axis of the evening. Two worthy young women marry the bachelors in the end and the twins are disposed of to their Irish father in Denver. There bustles through the entertainment a fussy and magnificently maidenly sister of one of the bachelors, to whose share falls much of the comedy. This part, played by Laura Hope Crews, was easily the most eventful. Ernest Truex did pretty well as the more cowardly of the adoptive bachelors.

Iolanthe. It has become so much a fixed custom to gurgle happy criticisms over any Gilbert and Sullivan opera--just because it is Gilbert and Sullivan--that lolanthe as produced by Winthrop Ames left a lot of people without adjectives. It is generally agreed that in this entertainment he has done the best job of any producer attempting one of the famous series in our time. The only anxiety now is that he may be distracted before he has revived everyone of the operas in an equally felicitous vein.

Gilbert and Sullivan were such an amazingly clever couple that most of the recent producers giving their works have spent a good deal of money on costumes and left the rest to the words and music. In reality the operas need the deft and specialized treatment demanded by any unique type of entertainment. Probably most producers, preoccupied with sex appeal and the Charleston, do not understand Gilbert and Sullivan. It has remained for Winthrop Ames to reveal them so perfectly that everyone may understand and may enjoy.

Mr. Ames has simplified his task by employing players that are for the most part widely unknown. All of them are good and some of them are extraordinary. Ernest Lawford, the only one of whom most people have heard, is conspicuously excellent as the susceptible Lord Chancellor with the pleasant occupation--

The constitutional guardian I Of pretty young Wards in Chancery, All very agreeable girls--and none Are over the age of twenty-one.

The opening night audience at Iolanthe was the most enthusiastic, most genuinely grateful of any similar gathering this season. The show is now accepted as incomparably the finest musical preparation of its type in town, and probably in the world.

Best Plays

These are the plays which, in the light of metropolitan criticism, seem most important.

SERIOUS

BRIDE OF THE LAMB--Alice Brady giving what many consider the finest performance of the season in a harrowing discussion of sex and religion.

THE GREAT GOD BROWN--An intricate and baffling masterpiece about a man who borrowed brains and could not pay them back.

CYRANO DE BERGERAC--Walter Hampden's revival of the sound old romance about a lover with a big nose.

LESS SERIOUS

THE LAST OF MRS. CHEYNEY--Suavity and stolen pearls among the good sorts and stuffed shirts of the English nobility.

THE WISDOM TOOTH--A fantasy of failure and success through finding yourself a child again.

WHAT EVERY WOMAN KNOWS--Barrie's gentle comedy revived with Helen Hayes in the old Maude Adarns role.

MUSICAL

Good looking, listening and laughing may be found at these: Iolanthe, The Vagabond King, Sunny, Cocoanuts, Pinafore, By the Way, Artists and Models, Tip-Toes, Raquel Metier and No, No, Nanette.

No Flop

The week following Raquel Meller's $27.50 debut, a Manhattan gum- chewers' sheetlet, the Mirror, was out with the news that she was a "flop."* Speculators were described as anguished because they could not unload admissions to her expensive performances ($11 after the opening). Large pictures were displayed of Meller and Irene Bordoni side by side. Bordoni is the wife of E. Ray Goetz, Meller's importer. Was Bordoni vexed, asked the sheetlet, because her husband had presented, so sensationally, this Spanish onion ?

The sheetlet, of course, misled its readers.

On her opening week at the Empire, Meller attracted in four performances $26,800. This is considerably more than even the most spectacular show in town could make in four exhibitions (Sunny grosses about $43,500 for eight performances). Her second week brought $26,500 in box office receipts. Following her Manhattan engagement she will give one, sometimes two performances in Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, Detroit, Cleveland, Kansas City, St. Louis, Cincinnati, San Francisco and Los Angeles.

* Theatrical term for a flat failure; particularly a financial failure.