Original Specialty

"GENTLEMEN, BE SEATED!"--Dailey Paskman and Sigmund Spaeth--Double-day Doran ($4.00). "There'll be a hot time in the old town tonight, my baby," when the interlocutor bids his black-face gentlemen be seated, and starts the volley of wisecracks between Bones and Tambo, the two "endmen." Endmen not only in the semicircle, these two always have the last word--at the expense of the ponderous master of ceremonies, Mr. Interlocutor. For "he is the father of all the foils in vaudeville, those well-dressed gentlemanly fellows of unimpeachable manners, who speak such painfully correct English and are such easy prey for the low buffoonery of their companions ... it is one of the laws of human drama that this should be so. ... The crowd likes nothing better than to see a half-wit get the better of a pompous intellectual. It restores confidence as it were." When he is in a tight fix, Mr. Interlocutor blandly and sonorously announces a rendition by our silver-voiced tenor, or an original specialty by our own little Mr. Tambo.

Mr. Spaeth has collected a notable array of heterogeneous minstrel favorites-- ribald, comic, sentimental, naive. Some of these songs, and many old chestnuts, have been ordered into a very playable "working model" which will undoubtedly be used as a basis for many an amateur theatrical--to say nothing of radio boys' programs.

A useful manual, "Gentlemen, Be Seated!" is moreover good reading, not only for its "business," but for its record of minstrelsy since 14th century troubadours. Though the emphasis is of course upon the scions of the American burnt-cork circle, they have not been accorded the full responsibility they have undoubtedly had for weaning an 18th century public away from stage bombast to the extremely humanist drama of today.