The Play
Skinner, R. Dana
Ruddigore WHAT is a poor manager to do who would revive a Gilbert and Sullivan opera in the same city where Winthrop Ames has re-created lolanthe and The Pirates of Penzance? The sheer...
...If the youngsters had one-fourth of the authority of these old-timers, what shows we should have...
...The final result was a group of men singing and moving with the needed precision of a chorus, but flashing before the eye as a group of distinct personalities, investing the performance with the true illusion of variety and life and spontaneity...
...Like many a fine trouper, he has his tricks, but they are intentional ones, striking at their mark with an altogether admirable precision...
...Take, for example, the management of the chorus of peers in lolanthe...
...It follows the fortunes of a sea-captain's daughter from the coffee-house she keeps for sailors at Newport through various up-to-date adventures in Chinese waters to an idyllic conclusion...
...One interesting innovation in these revivals is a return to pre-war box-of5ce prices...
...Except for occasional raucous and double-meaning jokes scattered through the dialogue, the story of this show is as Cinderella-like and harmless as an April zephyr...
...The story goes that Mr...
...The sheer perfection of Mr...
...Then Sarah Edwards gives quite a lift to the sorrows and foibles of Mad Margaret...
...Ames asked each member of the chorus to think of himself as an individual character...
...Lotus Robb plays the provocative Katherine Bence, about whose dreams of a career the play centers—the difficult part of a girl with no talent and high vaulting ambitions who must still retain the sympathy of the audience...
...He opened in the present revival of Kempy, but was unfortunately called away for another engagement...
...To be sure the Belasco tradition is not being broken entirely, as Hit the Deck is adapted from Hubert Osborn's play, Shore Leave, which was originally presented by Mr...
...In this complex task, Winthrop Ames is a past master...
...His idea was to revive as many successes of recent years as the publiq seemed to have appetite for, engaging, so far as possible, the original casts...
...Charles King as the illiterate Bilge is a better actor than singer...
...Ames's staging has, in two short years, established a standard and tradition by which all other efforts will be measured and, in nine cases out of ten, condemned...
...They are intelligent, well balanced and much more within the Gilbert and Sullivan spirit than the occasional gaudy revivals of the Shuberts...
...Kempy Again WHILE the Irish Rose of Master Abie goes on forever, it is rather joyous to see a play of the same vintage revived, and with marked success...
...If nothing else can induce you to go, let it be the magnificent work of William Danforth...
...One man decided he would be a deaf peer, holding his trumpet to his ear on every occasion...
...His range is somewhat limited by physical appearance and vocal equipment, but within that range he can be as moving an actor as we have on the stage...
...It does not insult one's intelligence by ignoring everything but sentiment and low comedy...
...Perhaps the stage tradition established by the Nugents lacks some of the superlative lustre which clings around the Drew-Barrymore family, but thisi much can be said in all conscience, that if we had half a dozen Nugent families writing for and acting in the modern theatre, the general level of artistry (not to mention cleanliness) would be immeasurably higher...
...THE sepulchral gloom of the Belasco Theatre now cherishes for the first time in its history the thunderous rhymths of a bright and quick stepping musical play...
...Even the chorus is well above the average...
...The idea seems to be an excellent one, unless, through perversity, the public which is being offered exceptional fare at low prices becomes suspecious of the price itself...
...The former has to think of diction, voice, personal appearance, gesture, "business," the interplay of type with type, and, above all, of the possibility of creating a total effect so permanent and so well understood by the actors that when his directing eye is withdrawn the performance will swing along without him, carried on night after night by the intelligent momentum he has given it...
...Surely not in casting...
...His work is notable for its great simplicity and the perfection of its detail...
...His playwriting achieves no particular distinction...
...The latter has to think only of the tonal effect...
...The program star is Louise Groody, recently in No, No, Nanette...
...This falls with particular hardship on Lawrence J. Anhalt, whose courage and enthusiasm gave us the little-known Princess Ida more than a year ago, and who now revives Ruddigore with a most excellent cast...
...It is this finer delicacy of direction which the Anhalt production of Ruddigore somewhat lacks—a most intangible quality, but one that makes all the difference between distinction and ordinary excellence...
...Just what is the difference...
...the Phillips repertory season will beconducted at another theatre...
...A certain "gob" rejoicing in the name of Bilge Smith is the hero...
...It is frequently rough and ready, and it makes no pretense at avoiding accepted theatrical hokum...
...A Nugent play is pretty apt to take full cognizance of the times we live in...
...It is not, however, an Ames evening...
...But in its quiet satire, in its tolerant observation of current fads, in its healthy rooting in fundamentals, it surpasses very often the most brilliant concoctions of the so-called sophisticates...
...Miss Robb effects this compromise with no little skill...
...To appreciate just what a director means to a performance, the public would have to attend rehearsals, would have to see the painstaking insistence with which each group of lines, each stated action, each ensemble is repeated again and again, molding the action to the individual talents of the actors until every last ounce of movement and interest, of comedy or tragedy, is extracted...
...The present Ruddigore is an excellent evening's entertainment...
...His revivals are more than workmanlike...
...Belasco...
...If the Kempy cast sets the standard to follow, there need be no fear of any catch in an ante-prohibition ticket cost...
...Various other characters clutter up the scene with song and dance to fit the mood, the bright particular star of this group being Stella Mayhew, to whom is allotted that unquestioned song of the season known as Hallelujah...
...With William Danforth as Sir Despard Murgatroyd, Alexander Clark as Robin Oakapple, Craig Campbell as Richard Dauntless, and Herbert Waterous as the ghost of Sir Roderic, it would be hard to find a cast of better vocal equipment or by and large with a better turn for Gilbertian patter...
...In spite of this, Ruddigore is worth seeing...
...Kempy, however, has caught on so well that it will be continued indefinitely, and...
...There is little of Shakespearean grandeur about him, but if anyone has given this year a performance of greater artistic integrity than his own in God Loves Us, I have failed to see it...
...Anhalt deserves more encouragement and recognition than he has received from the critics...
...Chiefly, one suspects, in the personal direction and supervision of Mr...
...Another decided to be old and querulous, another to be young and dashing...
...Miss Groody is neither the prettiest nor the most accomplished of the younger musical comedy stars, but has an abundancei of good spirits, the routine pathos demanded for the first-act curtain, and a very engaging manner withal...
...Hit the Deck...
...Kempy is worth seeing, not only as an object lesson in how good a decent play can be, but for its sheer worth as light and pleasant entertainment...
...Sturdy plays, done a little carelessly, but planted in character and individuality...
...But it is a bit incongruous, if highly diverting, when, one contrasts the heavy black and brown setting of the theatre itself with the lively lighting and rhythm of musical comedy...
...Elliott Nugent, it will be recalled, as an inhibited scholar at a mid-western university gave an individual performance of great merit in The Poor Nut...
...Nor must we omit from the catalogue of good points the excellent dances arranged by Seymour Felix, the vigorous music of Vincent Youmans, or the singing of a certain female quartette in Chinese costume...
...That grand old stage family, the Nugents, are doing it at the Hudson theatre, as of course they should, since J. C. (Papa) Nugent and Elliott Nugent wrote the play and originally appeared in it...
...But it is Stella Mayhew in the familiar garb of a colored mammy, who sets the pace of authority...
...Ruth Nugent, who has recently been playing the part created by Laura Sheffield in The Constant Nymph, plays Ruth Bence, the somewhat Cinderella daughter of the crabbed Dad Bence—Dad, of course, being the vehicle for J. C. Nugent himself...
...His place is quite competently taken by Anderson Lawler in the title role of Kempy James...
...Incidentally, the Kempy revival is the first in an experimental season of repertory initiated by Murray Phillips...
...Another adopted a particular walk...
...The theatrical director's job is, in many respects, more difficult than the orchestral leader's...
...The mere fact that they do not see him waving a baton, as they do an orchestral leader, detracts from their estimate of his importance...
...Both father and daughter succeed in lifting their parts well above type...
...Take J. C. Nugent himself...
...Where, then, lies the difference...
...In spite of much discussion and publicity, the role of the director in the theatre is still vague to most theatre-goers...
...If Violet Carlson is a bit vaudevillian and obvious as Rose Maybud, she nevertheless scores every point with her audience, which (be the truth told) is more than some of the Ames soprani have been able to do...
Vol. 6 • June 1927 • No. 5
