The Play

...Half of the young things in recent editions of the Garrick Gaieties could have done better than Miss Keeler...

...Show Girl is a musical adaptation, written by William Anthony McGuire, of J. P. McEvoy's novel of the same name, with musical score by George Gershwin...

...McGuire and Ruby Keeler Jolson (who takes the part of Dixie Dugan, the heroine) were it not for the fact that Mr...

...Sexual perversion is a very different matter...

...Bomboola HAVING objected strenuously to Irving Cooper's production of Harlem, as being unjust to the Negro and emphasizing only the cruder aspects of his race, I was rather amused to see a repetition of some of the same material in the same manager's musical play, Bomboola, modified by a protest from one of the stage characters against this very sort of exhibition...

...Her rhythm is continuous...

...Her performance seems to have aroused distinct differences of opinion, but I find myself squarely in the camp of those who think that some two score soubrettes of recent years could have made Dixie Dugan a far more entertaining stage character...

...One might lay the whole blame at the respective doors of Mr...

...If so, more's the pity...

...At times the sheer energy of the orchestra under William Daly beats them up to a heated tempo...

...One gets the feeling, perhaps unjustly, that Mr...

...Bomboola does give occasion, however, for some excellent singing by a Negro quartet, some superlative tap dancing by a dusky gentleman named Derby, and for one thoroughly amusing sketch by Mason and Fletcher entitled Inter-Feud...

...Until then, we must endure compromises between the sophistication of white drama and the crudity of exaggerated black...

...To physicians it is a tragedy, requiring the utmost from their resources...

...It contains no original contribution...

...Imagine, for example, what Bobby Arnst could have done with the part...

...At the Ziegfeld Theatre...

...It is just possible, then, that the fault is in good part his...

...It is all very curious and disconnected, after the worst tradition of musical plays, but reasonably inoffensive until the repetition of the Harlem rent party...

...But she could not surpass, nor, I believe, equal Miss Hoctor in pure unstudied poetry of motion...

...No one really thought he was glorifying American girls...

...In fact, she is a sweet, dark thing from the South, who comes North to make her way on the stage, and ends by marrying her old sweetheart from the plantation...

...Now, however, the monotony of glory has been broken, and there is actually a genuine lack of showmanship to report in many long stretches of Show Girl...

...In the last two decades we have seen many dancers from all countries, including the great Pavlowa...

...Ruby Keeler makes altogether too negative a heroine in a part that should have some brass and steel in it as well as sugar syrup...

...It is much as if one were to give the worst scenes from Elmer Gantry, and then have Elmer himself protest that the play was unfair to the ministry...

...Some day, if we are fortunate enough to live so long, an enterprising manager will really present a Negro review which catches the superb, naive genius of the race, and projects it across the footlights with all the simplicity and direct charm of which the Negro is a master...

...Ziegfeld has been so busy and successful at glorifying the Ameiican gill for trackless years that we have all tAen him for granted —assumed that he was infallible within his own medium, and stored by occasional new adjectives to express recurrent delight...

...But all the driving effect is in the instruments and not in the score itself...

...McEvoy has so often failed, in past reviews he has written, to give dramatic effect to his particular brand of humor...

...In fact, he was actually putting most of them to shame by selecting only such astonishing beauties that they did little more than remind us of the shortcomings of those we ran across during the daily humdrum...

...To make it the subject of loudmouthed humor on the stage is an offense to all sense of proportion as well as decency...

...Even his Parisian ballet scene is a languid effort to recapture some of the violent inspiration of his own famous rhapsodie...

...But the situation is not improved by the injection of another of those songs turning blatantly on perversion and its supposedly comic aspects...

...Companionate marriage has furnished the excuse for considerable filth on the stage during the last year...

...Here at least is a subject on which there can be no general disagreement...

...She had also a more vivid and engrossing personality...

...She is not bad—but she utterly lacks sparkle and verve, and the tone of the whole performance lets down in consequence whenever she is on the stage...

...But we accepted the glorifying fiction much as we accepted Barnum's freaks—a pleasant illusion lending glamour to a few spare hours and doing no particular harm by its obvious untruth...

...For his showmanship, for his tinsel and for the general gaiety he contributed, no one had anything but praise...

...It merits a thorough scalding by those in authority...

...Gershwin has written a bit condescendingly as if he felt that he had really graduated into higher musicianly spheres and was doing something beneath him...

...Ziegfeld is not the only offender in this respect, but he was among the first, if memory serves correctly, to give this kind of "humor" a place of prominence in a supposedly first-class review...

...Gershwin's music—it is the work of a tired man or else of a lazy man...

...Hitherto Ziegfeld has held a position analogous to Barnum's...

...In this case, the character who makes the protest does not offend herself...

...A Ziegfeld show girl was about as unlike the daily flapper as a prize cow is unlike the obscure heavy duty animal who keeps the milk trains going...

...But not all the blame is his...

...Pavlowa had a more universal art and far greater versatility...

...As to Mr...

...But at least managers can plead that the subject is being discussed in high places...

...The sheer undulating poetry of Miss Hoctor's movements are without parallel on our stage...

...His short sketches have a habit of doing much the same thing that Show Girl does—that is, of starting briskly, of dragging out too long and of ending in anticlimax...

...The other pieces are routine echoes...

...Yet it is the best part of the whole score...

...Not one of them has achieved this particular quality of flowing movement in a measure to equal Miss Hoctor...

...All in all, the best moments are supplied by Barbara Newberry, in a secondary part, by some of Jimmie Durante's rawboned comedy, and, of course, by the inimitable Albertina Rasch ballet girls, presenting an exquisite background for the loveliest dancer of our times, Harriet Hoctor...

...The story, as it filters through, is insipid and carelessly strung together, establishing nothing in particular by way of characterization, and with amazingly little inherent humor...

...When we had reason to object to Ziegfeld, it was because of his occasional pernicious habit of throwing in some filthy scene or joke, usually based on some phase of sexual perversion...

...No useful purpose could be served by passing over the offense in silence...

...At the Royale Theatre...