Vogues

With two big girl-shows opening in Manhattan last week (see col. 1) moralists hurried as usual to see them, to make sure they were not indecent. Historians reflected. Twenty years ago Producer Florenz Ziegfeld presented Miss Innocence, with the late Anna Held (milk baths). Of it Theatre Magazine said: ". . . Bare legs and suggestive humor . . . sheath gowns [padlocked] to nothing at all." Also in 1909, famed Composer Richard Strauss's Selome was sung and danced by Mary Garden. Spurred by this event, Publisher Conde Nast's newly-acquired feminine smartchart Vogue editorialized:

"One of the most disturbing features in connection with the many decadent productions that have been disported on the metropolitan stage this season . . . is the fact that they have been attended by thousands of respectable young girls, either with the sanction, or in the company of, their parents or guardians. . . . [This] indicates such a general lack of ethical, as well as thetic qualities, as makes even the most liberal minded sigh for a return of the ascetic Puritan spirit which so sternly repressed certain forms of wrongdoing. . . . When daringly salacious scenes, songs and tableaux are wildly applauded, not only by evening audiences but at matinees where women predominate, the manager may quite naturally be expected to conclude that his production is not morally offensive to the community. . . . Last season . . . owing largely to the opposition of the daughter of a director, New York was spared the disgrace of a most objectionable opera, and had the directorate of another house included among the members of its several families one or two such conservers of morals this season also the city would have escaped the hideous spectacle of a disgustingly realistic presentation of debased womanhood. To come into contact with moral pitch visually or orally is defiling, and to sit through one suggestive play, except for the purpose of protesting to newspaper, police department, priest or minister in an effort to stir up indignation against it, is to consent to defilement. This is a matter in which whoever does not condemn, condones, and to condone immorality is a ghastly business for the citizens of any Christian country to be engaged in."