New Plays in Manhattan

Padlocks of 1927. Mary Louise ("Texas") Guinan, queen-mother of the night clubs, shunted her honkytonk furies into the Shubert Theatre to dispense the usual small attentions with large-scale intimacy. She makes her entrance riding down the aisle on a white Arabian horse. Her locally famed "girlies" rush out among the audience, pelting them with cotton balls. Miss Guinan herself is in the aisles as often as on the stage, shaking hands, bantering wisecracks, kissing bald pates that clearly answer for her rouged caresses. While she is changing costumes, vaudevillians take the stage--Jans & Whalen of the Keith circuit, Laura Wilkinson of the Body obviously Beautiful, singers of blues. There is a heavy tragic skit in which Texas weeps real tears, thanks the audience with honest sobs for their applause. Intimate glimpses of her night club adventure are revealed. "Hello, Sucker, Whaddaya mean ya been overcharged, lemme see that check. Why, ya poor sap! $124, huh! Sucker, you had two tele phone calls. Don't be dumb."

It is not a revue at all. It is less clever, more loud, bawdy, vulgar and--to people who like that sort of thing--vastly more entertaining than a Times Square revue could ever be, for the revue is not native while the night club is-- even in a theatre. It has the perfection of a weed that grows unashamedly where Nature intended. It has the dignity of a hoyden who scorns the hypocrisy of petticoats. Undoubtedly, it lacks refinement and many another virtue. "Honestly, Tex," says a stage policeman along in the second act, "don't you think virtue pays?" To which the Soul of Candor replies with a tolerant shrug, "Sure, if you got a market for it, sure it pays."

Madame X. Seventeen years ago this drama was seen through tears, to the accompaniment of sniffles. Even today, strong men in the audience rise quickly after the last curtain to pull their hats down over their faces. Sophisticated younger people seem to be unaffected, probably critical of the necessity, on the part of a young lady who has deserted her husband, of going straight to harlotry and ether. This the heroine does, returning to France to see her boy whom she left 20 years ago. To save his reputation, she commits murder. The boy is assigned to defend her in his first experience as a trial lawyer. Release, recognition and death follow. Rex Cherryman, last seen in The Noose, gives promise of developing into one of the theatre's most brilliant young actors. Carroll McComas, as the lady so much more sinned against than sinning, seemed real in spite of her struggle with late Victorian anguish.