New Plays In Manhattan

The Marquise. An English youth named Noel Coward wrote The Vortex (London 1924, Manhattan 1925) and since then disciples have awaited another play as good. The Marquise is another not so good. It is about a lady who descended upon a French chateau to see her old lover and her child by him. Soon she found the child affianced to a neighbor's son, also her child. It is carefully explained that save for these two slips the lady has been strictly moral, and the purpose of the play is to decide which of these two lovers she shall marry. This decision is reached after three acts of light but languid conversation. Too bad it is the play lags, for the performance is immensely satisfactory. Resplendent in hoops and ruffles, Billie Burke returns to the theatre for the title part. Her acting is eventful, feathery and fine. Reginald Owen and Arthur Byron revel in epigram and rages as the suitors; while one Madge Evans is the daughter. Conveniently for the play she closely resembles the lovely Billie Burke; conveniently, too, for Miss Madge Evans.

Iolanthe and The Pirates of Penzance. Winthrop Ames, true to his pledge to establish a Gilbert & Sullivan repertory, has inserted in the run of The Mikado one performance apiece weekly of the above famed light operas. The productions are essentially the same as when first presented by Mr. Ames in recent sea sons. They are unconditionally guaranteed.

Spellbound. Imagination, seed of woe, flowers into tragedy or pathos, according to the ground it falls on. In Spellbound, it has fallen on a London shopgirl. A pathetic play is the result. Yet so artfully is this pathos accented by Actress Pauline Lord, whose specialty has long been the anguish of the inarticulate, that the play's weakness is concealed. There are moments in Spellbound when Miss Lord crosses the high road of true tragedy and makes Ethel Underwood at least a half-sister to all whose dreams have led them lost.

You know in the second act where to have the play. Ethel's snakelike husband calls her a mock Lady Macbeth. She has married this Harold Carter, older and colder than herself, for security, and hopes of seeing the world. To get her, he deluded her with a daydream of life in India. Now that he knows she will never love him, he poisons her daydreams. Their mutual hate--although the play does not quite show how--becomes their bond. Through a lover she contrives his murder.

Actor Campbell Gullan performs notably as the jealous huband exercising his shoddy, maniacal little power over the frightened girl. His support lends much point to that baffled breathlessness, that twitching of the limbs and lips, that broken laughter and word-fumbling by which Miss Lord intensifies hopelessness. O. P. Heggie, with pursed smile, elusive spectacles and amiable absentmindedness, is her dreamy father. In the epilog, kept at opposite ends of a bare table by her prison's regulations, they still try to pretend to gether, try to laugh "that such a thing should happen to people like us."

Artists and Models. The Winter Garden, onetime cavern of corruption, no longer displays daring shows. Nothing is daring any more in Manhattan. It's too easy. Wherefore one does not go to this extravaganza hoping not to be found out. One takes one's wife & children. Well, perhaps not one's youngest children. One finds an evening alive with chorus girls. More beautiful girls than ever. It's odd how chorus girls in Manhattan shows seem to grow better & better looking on the average. One finds delightful dancing; even a smart song here and there. A German dialect comedian called Jack Pearl is very funny; one Jack Osterman tries and tries to be funny. One finds another good revue.

The King Can Do No Wrong. There has not been one of those improvised Balkan kingdoms set up on our stages for ever so long. Usually they deal with morganatic marriages, often with a princeling in love with a U. S. maiden rich enough to make it a J. P. Morganatic marriage. But not this time. There is a girl, to be sure. She is practically seduced, to start the plot. And by the prince, too, who is promptly murdered. The rest of the play is a detective story with Lionel Atwill as the detective in gold lace. Mr. Atwill strutted a good deal.

New York. Ardent playgoers well remember a last season drama named Chicago. Not so memorable is New York. In it a lonely shop girl goes grievously wrong. The manner of her going brought back to some more ancient listeners the flowery days of Nellie, the Beautiful Cloak Model,--days when a properly seething villain chewed up at least one set of scenery every evening.

A Midsummer Night's Dream. The U. S., home of the huge, agreed that Max Reinhardt, Austrian, was the master of spectacle when he wove the wonder of The Miracle in 1924. Disapproving this restrictive distinction, he recently closed his Berlin and Vienna theatres, and bundled actors, scenery, costumes, to Manhattan to show his skill at smaller things. His first production was far from small, but it was delicate and true. Perhaps he started on a spacious scale in order to ease great expectations gradually down to subtler things.

The production of Shakespeare's comedy is a beneficiary of much Mendelssohn music and more Reinhardt. Some croaked: "You couldn't see the Shakespeare for the scenery and the ballet." Yet most people left the house filled with a sense of all imaginable marvels. The evening is like nothing in our current theatre. It borrows from the dance, the scene designer, the musician, the actor, the blabbering low comic and the story teller. With rare, almost incredible, genius of synthesis these elements are blended in delicate pageantry. Herr Reinhardt bewitches the emotions with every charm that can be worked within a walled building where a stage is set. There are flaws, but they are drowned in beauty.

Famed European players, Alexander Moissi, Lili Darvas, etc., seemed good in their parts, but never comparable to the sum of the whole. The wriggling darting Puck of Wladimir Sokolov was a vivid individual contribution. Rosamond Pinchot, discovered as an actress by Max Reinhardt for The Miracle, is the single native per former with a speaking part. She, like the rest, talks German.

Tia Juana is a town just across the Mexican border famed for ruthless infamy. In Tia Juana, it is said, one may go swiftly and uncouthly to perdition. Trading upon this no doubt hard-earned reputation, a melodrama has been christened for the town. It is a leaden thing, studded with murder, Chinamen smuggling, federal agents; almost every element of melodrama except excitement.