In St. Louis

Bluest of St. Louis blues are those which in recent years have beset that city's theatre managers. Long have St.

Louis audiences been notoriously sparse and cool. During the 1927 Christmas season, one of the two legitimate theatres in St. Louis harbored Abie's Irish Rose. The other one was empty. But this summer St. Louis feet will tap to the rollicking rhythms of several syncopated operettas, including Rainbow, Funny Face, The Five O'Clock Girl, Sally, Peggy Ann, Tell Me More, Here's Howe. These diversions, all but two of them new to St. Louis, will be staged by the newly-founded Theatre Society of St. Louis, similar to Manhattan's Theatre Guild. From more than 400 applicants, 32 agile St. Louis girls have been selected to skip in the choruses. Other St. Louisans are designing scenery, working backstage. Famed headliners--Mary Eaton, Leon Errol, Lulu McConnell--have already accepted contracts for the summer season. Like the city's successful Municipal Opera Company, the theatre will be in the open air, under a dome of boughs. Top price: $2.50. Life membership in the Society (entitling to 20% price reduction): $25. These frolics al fresco are counted on to stimulate theatre-unconscious St. Louisans so that next winter a program of more serious dramatics may be given with profit. Plays of John Galsworthy and Frederick Lonsdale have been considered for presentation in a renovated downtown theatre. A $1,000 prize awaits the first St. Louisan who writes a producible play. The Theatre Society was conceived by an Englishman named Peter Greig, Cambridge graduate, onetime actor with Sir Herbert Tree, Mrs. Patrick Campbell, Marie Tempest. To direct the project, he resigned lately as assistant to Publisher Joseph Pulitzer of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, one of the Society's chief backers.