Doldrums

In no recent summer have there been so few plays in Manhattan theatres as the past three months. Last week big-jowled, cigar-chewing William A. Brady, oldtime showman, told Atlantic City Kiwanians that the recumbent theatre business might be helped to its feet by turning half its playhouses into garages. Bridge and radio, gloomed Showman Brady, were responsible. The stage had done too much for U. S. culture, said he, thus to be beggared. Let the nation, remembering its Wartime services, come to the theatre's aid!

Of the 50 legitimate playhouses in the Times Square district 42 were dark last week. The eight that remained lighted were occupied as follows: two by last season musical comedies (The Cat & The Fiddle, Of Thee I Sing), two by revivals (Show Boat, That's Gratitude), two by plays which opened at the tail end of the season (Another Language, Bridal Wise), two by new plays as doleful as the doldrums which have beset the theatre all summer.

Chamberlain Brown's Scrap Book-- Producer Brown hired 67 performers, distributed them among 21 vaudeville acts loosely held together by conversations between stage and a lower box, and had six left over for a claque. Producer Brown called the result "super-vaudeville." Actors' Equity Association called it a revue, ordered the 33 Equity members to quit, threatened to oust them when they refused. Last week none had given notice, none had been dropped from Equity, Producer Brown was still filling two houses a day, including Sunday, at prices from 25-c- to $1.

Scrap Book contains a burlesque of East Lynne, a scene from King John, bits from Pagliacci and Carmen, a radio sketch, a musicomedy sketch, a torch singer, several other singers, three masters of ceremonies (one male, one female, one indeterminate), a Florodora act, etc., etc. Best act by far is a burlesque sketch in which Mae Dix, onetime Minsky burlesque girl, becomes drunk, disrobes, does strange things with her famed indiarubberlike stomach. Dorothy MacDonald also disrobes, more teasingly. At the beginning of the burlesque sketch, members of the claque run up & down the aisles selling "Feelthy pictures, feelthy pictures, Martha Washington candies."

Page Pygmalion (Carl Henkle, author; Alan Merrill, producer) is an abortive farce about a young sculptor who is in love with his model but wants to marry an heiress. The sculptor's cousin John from Oklahoma City (Robert Emmett Keane) has the bright idea of persuading the model to mount a pedestal and simulate the statue for which she posed. Having heard many things, the model astonishes a large gathering by coming down off her pedestal and announcing that the heiress is. the illegitimate daughter of a janitor. The sculptor gives up sculpting, marries the model, returns to Oklahoma City. The model (June Clayworth) is most attractive when she is being a statue.

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