The Dial (Third Series)/Volume 75/The Theatre (November 1923)
THE THEATRE
HIGH Spots of the New Season: Ralph Barton's poster of the Lady Pincushion on the side-show tent in Poppy and W. C. Fields appearing for the first time in history in a speaking part (he proves to have a high tremulous tenor rather like a refined and appealing eloquent preacher). The spiritualist-detective play Zeno, which combines the sinister excitement of melodrama with the agreeable surprise of a conjuring performance. In this play, a man who wants to rob a safe commits a dangerous murder, stages a fake spiritualistic seance, fills the pockets of a whole assemblage of people with objects designed falsely to cast suspicion on them, and with the aid of a whole army of accomplices succeeds in installing highly complicated mechanical devices in a house in which people are living. There is no nonsense about explaining why he went to all this trouble—why, since he knew the combination, he didn't simply go and open the safe, instead of spending days and weeks filling the house with conjuring tricks; and that is why the play is fascinating; it is fascinating like one of Goldberg's devices for killing flies or eating soup without a spoon. The take-off on spiritualist-detective plays in the Music Box Review—also, in this latter, Mr Benchley's great Endowment Fund speech and some of Irving Berlin's jazz counterpoint, especially the curious modernized waltz with its shivery opening descent, like sinking in an express elevator. The colours and costumes of the Greenwich Village Follies and some of the tumbling and trick dancing. Otherwise, theGreenwich Village Follies is not quite up to standard this year: it re-echoes a little forlornly in the Winter Garden, which is much too big for it and seems, besides, to have infected it with banality. Miss Katharine Cornell's gorgeous blue and rose crinolines in Casanova—which, however, are the best thing in the production. Miss Cornell is extremely pretty in her eighteenth century costumes, but her performance is rather hollow. I tried hard, but I could not believe in her love affair with Casanova. But that is perhaps not altogether her fault: in the first place, Mr Lowell Sherman, though fairly plausible as a quick-witted knave, in emotional scenes is impossible; and in the second, the play itself is so hollow that I doubt if very much is to be made of it. What Mr Woods and Mr Miller really need to carry off their investment in such magnificent costumes and in a set for an eighteenth century inn at Geneva which looks like the Japanese Room at the Ritz is a new play about Casanova.—And finally, I would commend the French screen version of Anatole France's Crainquebille—the best film I have ever seen, which almost shook my faith in the impossibility of the movie as a medium for dramatic art.
The Lullaby is a new play by Mr Edward Knoblock. Mr Knoblock is, I am told, one of the three men in the English-speaking world who knows most about the theatre. He is a master of dramatic technique and has an unerring sense of the stage; he is an encyclopaedia of all the plots and situations of the last fifty years. The result is that, in The Lullaby, you know the end of almost every one of Mr Knoblock's dozen or so scenes as soon as you have seen the beginning and that you find your lips automatically pronouncing with the actor the words of Mr Knoblock's speeches as soon as you have heard the first phrase. Yet I would rather see The Lullaby than The Children of the Moon, which is, I think, the most tedious play, bar none, I have ever sat completely through. The author has evidently tried to do something in the closely fitted, slightly symbolic later manner of Ibsen and the result is that he has reproduced the technique without either the poetry, the insight into character or the genius for dramatic effect. You sit there and watch the old Ibsen machine grinding along to its relentless close—but unfortunately there is no excitement in watching the wheels go 'round because it is evident that nothing is going to happen which you did not know about in the first place.
The Italian Marionettes at the Frolic are the best I have ever seen. They are better than Tony Sarg's because they are less realistic. Tony Sarg followed the great modern fallacy and tried to make his puppets reproduce life—in one of his plays, I remember, he had a dog which might almost have been mistaken for a real dog. But the Italian marionettes are conventionalized and grotesque—what is the use of making artificial men if they are going to be exactly like real men? The Italian ones still have some of the naïve charm of the pre-realistic world. And their performance, unlike that of Mr Sarg's, is throughout enlivened with music; instead of a play with dreary spoken speeches, there is the score of a little opera by Cesar Cui. But I really can't see a whole evening of marionettes for anybody but children; I don't know how they have got such a reputation in New York as an exotic and delightful form of entertainment. No person over the age of twelve should ever allow himself to get let in for a marionette performance.
I hereby relinquish this department back into the hands of Mr Gilbert Seldes, lately returned from abroad. Mr Seldes has been engaged in the composition of a series of essays—soon to be published in a book—on "the Seven Lively Arts," in which he has discussed vaudeville, the jazz band, and the musical revue with a flaming prophetic enthusiasm which I—with all admiration for his book—have sometimes thought a little excessive. Yet after witnessing a year of the American theatre I really begin to understand how he has arrived at his present opinions; "God knows," as Oscar Wilde said about the martyrs, "I am with him in some things!" It is true (though perhaps it has always been true) that a great many of the favourites of the "serious" theatre have not half so much that is genuine to offer—are, in fact, not half so near to being "artists"—as the favourites of vaudeville and the revue. Al Jolson has more dramatic conviction than Joseph Schildkraut. Gilda Gray and Queenie Smith are more inspired than Eva LeGallienne. Ed Wynn has a more interesting imagination than Mr Hartley Manners. Florenz Ziegfeld is a better producer than William Brady—or Arthur Hopkins. This doesn't necessarily mean that the jazz people are great artists, as there is a tendency in some quarters to believe; but merely that they come nearer to the mark than the legitimate performers who have education and technique without either personality or passion.—But I step aside for Mr Seldes, who will tell you about it much better than I.