The Play
W., M. W., H. L. S., T.
January 6, 1926 THE COMMONWEAL 245 THE PLAY The Russian Players WHAT the Moscow Art Theatre Musical Studio has brought to America is what the American stage needs more than anything...
...Russell Hicks with any notion of intellectuality, even of the most current and shallow sort...
...Hurlbert is of the very best school of English humorists and Miss Courtneidge revealed herself as a remarkably clever comedienne who is destined to set the New York theatre world agog with the advent of a new star on its horizon...
...Into the great business of selling themselves everything has been impressed, and the admirer who cannot reconstitute his daily life from their daily offerings writes himself down an unworthy and inattentive follower...
...The break comes after a peculiarly exasperating party, when a mattress-manufacturing brother on a visit to New York becomes spokesman for the eternal verities...
...The result is a rich vein of personality running through the columns of the impersonal press...
...Wititterly, they express a vast number of views on an infinite number of subjects...
...The pair live, move and have their being in a welter of satellites, flappers, unattached wives, literary males caught between one unconclusive sentimental affair and another—noctambules who swing a wicked cocktail elbow, and from whose vagrant comments on men and matters Tony sucks the inspiration for his daily quota...
...The dancing and singing are in the best style of rendition with which the London stage has supplied us all too little in late years...
...Seldes's ascetic intention...
...A sea of domestic detail engulfs the last scene, and to one at least among the audience there was a strong reminiscent flavor of Barrie's "What Every Woman Knows" in its main incident...
...The Fifth Avenue Theatre is a very home-like and handsome little house...
...It was a really refreshing experience to New York theatre-goers to meet again in the work of Mr...
...By the Way is a clever and irresponsible skit on the times, done in a fashion now and then so British as to confuse our audiences but again in a way to create roars of laughter and general applause...
...The scene between Mr...
...The dialogue may be, it is true, intended as a sacrifice to realism but, if so, there seems no reason why the audience should be involved in Mr...
...Seldes tells us what the life of the wife of one of these victims to public curiosity is apt to be...
...But when it settles down to the intimate drama which we are promised in the near future, it should prove a welcome addition to the smaller houses from which we are growing more and more used to expect the vital and uncarpentered style of drama...
...Whether or not the ambitious ideas of the Moscow group concerning the synthesis of music and drama are realizable is still an unanswered question...
...French as the handsome young invalid and Miss Courtneidge, the sophisticated trained nurse, is something that will make New York sit up and take notice...
...Anne "Cooper," addressed here and there through the play as "Anne quote Cooper" is the lively and intelligent wife whom he has acquired on the platform of the Eiffel Tower...
...The New York Times has some reason to complain of liberties taken with its office routine...
...The singing of the principals is far from good, although the choral effects are excellent...
...They are the gents who condescend to an interest in the fight for the baseball pennant and who deliver the aesthetic message of Charles Chaplin...
...The colyumists are a fairly arrived and jubilant lot...
...In high spirits, but in uneven fashion, Mr...
...But not all the imagination in the world, aided by good looks, and a resonant voice will reconcile one reviewer to the association of Mr...
...It is generally understood that some millionaire or other, probably Mr...
...The mend comes at an elaborate party which Tony gives to celebrate his freedom...
...Like Dickens's Mrs...
...The creative playrights of America, such men as Eugene O'Neill, for example, are at present inspired by one of the most forceful and interesting movements that the American theatre has ever known...
...There is a quality of reserve and correctness about the whole revue that will please those in our audiences who have felt that our musical comedy producers have begun to go too far in their physical audacities...
...Otto H. Kahn, backed Mr...
...The emphasis on psychological subtleties in the midst of light opera does not seem artistically congruous...
...There are, of course, many exceptions to be made, but on the whole it remains true that nothing is so rare today on our native stage as real acting, genuine players, adequate stage production...
...Unfortunately, New York is afflicted today with a horde of men and women whose words cannot be understood five rows from the footlights, who are worse than suburban amateurs because they lack the interest and the enthusiasm of the amateur...
...Life has gone a little flat for both husband and wife...
...Even those to whom the briskly rendered dialogue has no more meaning than a conversation in Chinese, cannot fail to recognize the marvelous perfection, individually and collectively, of these players...
...The plays themselves are not particularly interesting, certainly not to those who do not understand Russian...
...M. W. Wise-Crackers THERE is every evidence in Mr...
...T. W...
...The scale of its stage seems unsuited to plays involving large casts...
...Also of our producers...
...Even more than in the case of the Russian actors of two seasons past, who so remarkably rendered the plays of Checkov and other dramatists, the present group, applying much the same methods as their predecessors to the rendition of travesties and light operas, prove that Russia, even in the turmoil of its revolution, has been able to accomplish more in dramatic art—at any rate, in the interpretation of dramatic art—than possibly any other country...
...It is sincerely to be hoped that this or some similar support is with him now...
...Like Touchstone, they ask only to be put in motley that they may speak their minds...
...only, unlike the musicians, they pass from solo parts to the mere accompaniment of others, as parts of a mob or a chorus, with equal devotion and equal skill...
...I would suggest that the best way, in the long run, that this support could be applied would be to arrange performances of the Russian players at the Jolson Theatre for mornings or afternoons, so that the audiences could be made up wholly or mostly of our native actors and actresses...
...Clumsy gestures, ridiculous makeup, personal idiosyncracies exaggerated apparently with the notion that they may attract attention and lead to stardom, the almost total absence of any sense of cooperation one with another, and the consequent absence of the atmosphere of illusion, of the magic of art, these are the afflictions forced upon the playgoers up and down Broadway...
...We anticipate a successful season for these English players...
...H L S Healthy Fun FRESH from London, where it has had a phenomenal run of a year at theN Apollo Theatre, the revue of By the Way opened on Monday night at the Gaiety Theatre...
...Wise cracks" degenerate into personalities between the loyal and invading wife and false friends whose watchful eyes have detected a falling off in the Cooper quality...
...But their efforts are terribly handicapped by the general inadequacy of the men and women to whom they must assign parts in their plays...
...They are the most public of all public men...
...Miss Mona Kingsley, as Anne, reveals herself afresh a graceful and sympathetic actress, with a noticeably quiet but intense method in getting her lines across...
...They overlay crude facts with a reconciling deposit of whimsicality...
...Tony Cooper is a popular editorial writer and colyumist whose "wise cracks" have accumulated for him a host of admiring friends of both sexes...
...Its dayto-day quality is wearing on Tony's invention, and Anne is hungering for a speech that has not the aroma of an unedited epigram...
...January 6, 1926 THE COMMONWEAL 245 THE PLAY The Russian Players WHAT the Moscow Art Theatre Musical Studio has brought to America is what the American stage needs more than anything else—the spirit and the expression of really first-class repertory theatre acting...
...Sophisticated souls, with a relish, real or assumed, for the daily pageant, the colyumists form a sort of liaison between the heavy thinker and the Babbitt...
...Morris Gest in his other dramatic adventures...
...Jack Hurlbert and Cicely Courtneidge the self-same charm that brought The Gaiety Girl and other successful English productions to such favor...
...The satire, to bite home, demanded brilliant lines with which Mr...
...Seldes has not furnished his character...
...Gilbert Seldes's "The Wise-Crackers" given at the Fifth Avenue Theatre that the play was conceived and carried out as a satire on the group whom the reading public has grown used to lumping together under the comprehensive title "colyumists" with every intention in the mis-spelling...
...The most memorable "wise cracks" one carries away are a few arabesques on the mattress trade whose tenor may be guessed, and advice to a lovelorn but impecunious couple to dispense with the services of City Hall and "write to Beatrice Fairfax...
...They accustom themselves to playing anything that they attempt as musicians play the score of a symphony, all contributing to a general effect...
...But there can be no doubting the fact that the Moscow Art Theatre has been able to bring together scores of men and women who are players, actors and actresses, first, last, and all the time...
Vol. 3 • January 1926 • No. 9
