New Play in Manhattan

Roberta (adapted by Otto Harbach from Alice Duer Miller's Gowns by Roberta, score by Jerome Kern; Max Gordon, producer) is another gallant try at making a handsome, funny and affecting play with music and dancing, girls and dresses. Plot: a U. S. college boy loses his girl because she thinks he is "small-town." To forget her, he visits his Aunt Minnie (Fay Templeton) who is Roberta, a famed Paris dressmaker. Planning to will her establishment to her assistant, a onetime Russian princess (Tamara), Aunt Minnie dies without signing the will, thus forcing her nephew-heir to turn dressmaker. The princess and the college boy go into partnership, fall reticently in love. The boy's old girl reappears, takes her young man back.

This exposition has taken a slow hour and not a chorus girl has yet been seen. Fay Templeton, a turtle-like little old (67) lady, has sung one charming song with the pinched remains of a fine alto voice, and then died. Composer Jerome Kern has supplied half .a dozen excellent tunes. Appearing as a customer of Aunt Minnie, Lyda Roberti has got her usual comedy out of wriggling her stomach to show that she is a dangerous woman and waving her arms to show that she is a tomboy. Finally novelty appears.

It is a mannequin show with a band, girls and dresses. An extraordinary chorus dance in the exotic style of Rockefeller Center Music Hall is done by girls in pastel -spangled, long -trained dresses. They wade, twitch, writhe. The result is effective.

Good sets by Designer Clark Robinson include a barroom walled solid with bottles, and a Russian cafe.

Good songs: "Let's Begin," "Alpha, Beta, Pi," "I'll be Hard to Handle." Typical line: "I wish I were in Russia. I'd put her on the Five Year Plan."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.