New Plays in Manhattan

Cross My Heart is an unpretentious little musicale. Its attractive qualities are summed up in the word cunning. Songs are not important in its story of a charming girl called Sally Blake (Mary Lawlor) pursued by the Maharajah of Mah-ha and in love with a rich boy masquerading as an orchestra leader.

This Thing Called Love. The author, Edwin Burke, believes that love "is the monkey wrench which life has thrown into the machinery of marriage." Perhaps, in the beginning, he wanted to deal with the thing seriously. But, with his gate in mind, he shambles into farce, ends with a drunken and melodramatic pistol shot.

An intelligent young woman (Violet Heming) and a Babbitt with ideals (Minor Watson) agree to get married on a business basis: he pays her a fat salary; she looks after his comforts, entertains his friends, but does not sleep with him; both are free to do whatsoever they please, to call off the marriage whensoever they wish. Love comes and the marriage is put on a more conventional footing. After that, the monkey wrench idea is used.

The Big Fight. The first audiences at The Big Fight were composed in large part of dapper and gruesome characters who in no way resembled the admirers of Gene Tunney. It is claimed that among the good qualities of its star, famed Pugilist Jack Dempsey, is the ability to remember persons who "remember him when."

The play which these persons witnessed with enthusiasm was plainly designed less as a model of intelligent drama than as a means of bringing their old friend before the footlights in praiseworthy poses. On the stage Jack Dempsey is an honest prize-fighter with a crooked manager; he loves a brunette who, because her brother is in the power of a bad gambler, agrees for his sake to put catnip in the champion's water-bottle so that the gambler may be assured in advance who will win the big fight. The audience, on the other hand, knows that no catnip or other poison can hamper Champ Jack Dillon in the performance of his art. The last scene shows the fight itself. Dempsey throws his hands around more wildly than he does in an off-stage ring but there are moments when he does not pull his punches. After his quiet, embarrassed performance in drawing-room or barber-shop episodes, it is a relief to see Jack Dempsey forget his good manners and exhibit gloves and socks. At the end of the fight, he embraces the girl.

Rubber Jerry Luvadis, Announcer Joe Humphreys and Estelle Taylor, who in comparatively private life is Mrs. Jack Dempsey, also appear in roles which approximate their normal occupations. Mrs. Dempsey is not, as commonly supposed, a star entirely of the screen; in her early youth an invalid, she grew up to be first a beauty-contest winner, then an actress in stock companies as well as the cinema. She and her husband both speak their lines in The Big Fight in a curious but not unattractive monotone.

The New Moon. The producers of elaborate musical comedies or operettas have now come to the conclusion that what the public wants is no longer "sex," but adventure and romance. No one knows how the producers have been able to detect this curious hunger; but they have not been slow in satisfying it. Hither is the present trend of Ziggy; the Shubert show, White Lilacs, makes a valentine out of a vulgar though exciting episode. In The New Moon, Schwab and Mandel, from the cheers and collegiate stomping of Good News, have turned to New Orleans before the French Revolution and the dreamy schemes of a handsome Gallic aristocrat called Robert to build a state wherein men may live as equals and wherein women shall be compelled to marry them.

Dressed in the magnificent rags of theatrical insurgence, surrounded by beautiful girls and elaborate scenery, yodeling a plea for stout-hearted men made tuneful by Sigmund Romberg, Robert (Robert Halliday) and his assistant (William O'Neal) organize their golden expedition. Robert is not content with merely this adventure; in making pretty passes at the hand of a charming aristocrat, he is arrested for treason. On the way to France where Robert is to be punished, the heroine-aristocrat helps to save him and put him in command of the boat on which he was a prisoner. The boat then turns to a peaceful island and its occupants set up their communistic colony. The father of the heroine, a sly shipowner, when he sees French ships sailing by, attempts to betray his son-in-law's renegade democracy to the royal government; only to discover that it has been decapitated as he too will be unless he grows more tractable.

While this long and shiny fable professes no Marxian solemnity, it is less silly than most operetta plots. Nor is it without a laugh; Gus Shy (whose grandfather, the late Solomon Scheu, was a onetime Mayor of Buffalo) is very funny as the valet of the hero. The leading lady, Evelyn Herbert, is entirely charming in appearance, although she has a pretty voice.