New Plays in Manhattan

Great Day. Vincent Youmans, composer of such infectious songs as "Tea for Two," "Sometimes I'm Happy'' and "Hallelujah," presents his country with several remarkable airs in this bromidic and tedious musicomedy about a Southern lass (Mayo Methot) whose ancestral mansion is sold for a gambling house. Needless to say, a comely Northerner (Alan Prior) eases her heart. Two of Composer Youman's best tunes, the lingering "Without A Song," the jubilant "Great Day," are magnificently reverberated by an Afric choir of 40 voices led by Mr. Lois Deppe. Other Youmans' melodies which will soon reach ballroom and loudspeaker: "Happy Because I'm In Love," "More Than You know," "Open Up Your Heart."

Lolly. Two flies, one mechanical and one temperamental, have long been present in the ointment of fashionable Manhattan theatre-goers. Mechanically, it is impossible to dine at 8 o'clock and see the first act of any play. Temperamentally, it is annoying not to know in advance whether the play will be sad or amusing, a problem or a diversion.

To remove these flies is the purpose of a socialite undertaking called the New York Theatre Assembly, which has now presented the first of a series of "amusing plays, in an intimate theatre, before a selected audience." The curtain rises at 9 o'clock. The play, by Fannie Heaslip Lea, describes the love affairs of two men, two women and a gigolo. Mary Young, expert in the impersonation of giddy dowagers (Dancing Mothers, Gypsy) is beset by the gigolo (Alberto Carrillo), and only escapes when her girlhood suitor (Hugh Miller), upon whom her family had frowned, returns after two decades of desperate forgetfulness in South America. In their hot youth he had gotten the matron with daughter, a hard-boiled maiden who throughout the play symbolizes the modern girl. These conventionalities are accented by pleasant dialog which attains such epigrammatic heights as: "Children should be the result of love, not love the result of children." Convinced that it had amused, the Assembly announced that subsequent plays would be in the Lolly genre.

On the opening night the Assembly emphasized its eclat with a platoon of Manhattan debutantes who served as ushers. The program listed a committee of Founders including: Mrs. William De Rham, Mrs. Adrian Iselin II, Mrs. Junius Morgan, Mrs. Kenneth M. Murchison, Mrs. William Church Osborn, Mrs. Herbert L. Satterlee. Executive director is Walter Greenough, longtime socio-dramatic entrepreneur.

The Channel Road. Critics customarily agree that Guy de Maupassant's Boule de Suif (The Ball of Fat) is one of the very great short stories. The ironic tools of the author were never more sharply employed than in this tale of several wealthy French refugees during the German invasion of 1870 who were detained at an inn by a German lieutenant because he had been scorned by a patriotic French prostitute in the party. The aristocrats wheedled and mentally coerced the girl until she surrendered to the officer. Then, as the group was permitted to move onward, she found herself figuratively spat upon by the people for whose sake she had sacrificed her honor, if not her purity. This cruel anecdote has now been adapted for the stage by Drama Critic Alexander Woollcott and Critic-Playwright George S. Kaufman (whose June Moon, written with Ring W. Lardner, was last fortnight's laughing hit, TIME, Oct. 21). As might have been expected, the force of the original is considerably dissipated. The rewriters have indulged in too much "fine writing" at the expense of de Maupassant's bleak power. They have devised a moralistic ending in which the German lieutenant forbids the haughty gentry to continue their journey, but gives safe conduct to the prostitute. Messrs. Woollcott and Kaufman have, however, happily restrained their tendency to wise crack, although at one point the prostitute, asked if she is going to church to atone for her sins, is made to say: "I'd need a cathedral." What remains is a picturesque, dilute version of de Mau passant which at times vibrates with two splendid performances -- yellow-haired Anne Forrest as the harsh-voiced harlot; Siegfried Rumann. a seasoned German, as the lieutenant of will, wit and philosophy. The Bonds of Interest. Why Walter Hampden thought he could vitalize this fantasy by famed Spanish Dramatist Jacinto Benavente, which was several years ago a Theatre Guild fiasco, seems likely to remain one of the season's mysteries. Its Hispanic tempo is that of a noonday doze in the patio. Mr. Hampden plays the part of a panhandler who cozens an innkeeper out of many a square meal and also secures an heiress for his backward henchman. These vagrancies are first described in tedious speeches elegantly read by Mr. Hampden with his best grand opera gestures, then acted with the velocity of a tortoise. Mr. Hampden and his cast, who bear such frolicsome names as Harlequin, Columbine, Polichinelle and Pantaloon, appear to regard themselves as very droll indeed. It must be said in their behalf, however, that the play, which possibly lost its verve in translation, affords them not a single shining line of dialog, nor one situation which cannot be foreseen, in anesthetic deadliness, a half-hour in advance.

The Middle Watch. It is still considered uproarious for a pretty girl to be found sneaking out of a man's room clad in carefully stitched stage chemise. This sort of revelation is constant in The Middle Watch, which seeks novelty by locating its bedrooms on a British warship. Two young ladies spend an innocent night aboard but endanger the status of their officer friends when an aged and moral Admiral arrives. This seadog (Fred Kerr) serves to lampoon Great Britain's glory on the high seas. Finding a sentry in his stocking feet, he exclaims: "This man's half naked!" A grumpy, lovable fellow, he endears himself to the cast and the audience. Most of the other players are English, have brought this comedy from a successful run in London and a few days in Washington, where Ishbel MacDonald (accompanied by Lady Isabella Howard, Edmond Howard, Miss Gytha Stourton, Michael Wright of the British Embassy and Thomas Archibald Stone of the Canadian Legation) laughed hard and often at its tried and trusty gaieties.

The Nut Farm is the kind of comedy which usually slides into Manhattan for the diversion of wan and heated summer residents. In the chill, perky atmosphere of autumn its hooligan obviousness gets only the least flattering applause. The Barton and Bent families move westward from Newark, N. J., to work a nut farm in California. There they succumb to the cinema virus and surrender some $30,000 of their savings to produce a family film. The result is disastrous until the smart young Barton son (Wallace Ford), by skillfully snipping out the dull sequences, converts their appalling drama into a burlesque. The humor throughout is on a par with the joke-buttons that small boys wear on their lapels.

Deep Channels. Critic J. Brooks Atkinson of the Times: "It was difficult to discover what the play was about. Candidly, it was impossible." Critic Robert Littell of the World: "After a few feeble efforts to convince ourselves that a play if bad enough can also be funny, we all relapsed into numbness and asphyxiation." Critic Percy Hammond of the Herald Tribune: "It is but a windy posture, meaning less than nothing. . . ." The plot involved a daughter of the haute monde who gave herself to a groom (thereby driving that young man's sweetheart to suicide) but wisely married a physician.