THE THEATRE
IN addition to the most distressing acting in the most puffed of plays by the accepted best of our actors and actresses, I have seen during the past month three perfect minutes by Harry Kelly in a musical comedy with the unbearable and "imbillivibil" title of Springtime of Youth. I am therefore not in despair of the future; I despair only of those who do not recognize the Kellys.
Loyalties fulfilled the hopes expressed here a month ago, and what is more astonishing was very much what the reviewers said it was, an adult, intelligent play. In the mere fact that the rather large cast was a unit, that each actor played in a definite relation to each other actor, the piece is better done than any other I have seen, or can now recall, of this year's products. It differs in extreme, in this respect, from To Love in which Miss Grace George and the Messrs Warwick and Trevor each acted in solitude, and each badly; it did not surprise me at all to learn that Mr Trevor dislocated his collar each night as an evidence of emotion; Miss Ruth Chatterton in La Tendresse weakens at the knees and slouches through the end of the "big" act for much the same reason. Mr Heywood Broun has said that most of our ingénues think that innocence is something you do with the neck, or words to that excellent effect; the methods of our leading players aren't a bit better.
What causes an amateur of light entertainment an acute distress (leaving us inconsolable by even the worst moments of serious acting) is the failure of so brilliant an institution as the Music Box Revue. It has its moments, yes; but it also has its hours, and in those hours nothing happens but the display of the dynamics of the stage—mean the use of the elevator and the trap-door. There are silks and draperies, but they also are hoisted and spread and exploited with skilful mechanism. It is necessary for plays of this sort to be funnier than this one is; Mr Clark is very good, though not as good as Mr Kelly; but willing as I am to live on bits and scraps in unpretentious musical comedy, I am spoiled for this sort of thing by the composed excellence of the first Music Box. Mr
