The Play

...May 22, 1929 THE COMMONWEAL 77 THE PLAY By RICHARD DANA SKINNER The Grand Street Follies THE Grand Street Follies have not quite graduated from their once naive estate into the full sophistication of a Broadway review, and the transition period is not as diverting as it might be...

...Something was lost between Grand Street and Broadway, and what Broadway has added is not what the old Grand Street days supplied...

...But if some enterprising violinist should take a piano concerto, and by picking out certain themes, superimpose a violin score, the result would be to stultify the effect of the piano without creating a satisfactory theme for the violin...

...I am inclined to rank Albert Carroll's take-off of Constance Collier in Serena Blandish as the best job I have ever seen him do, with the possible exception of his Mrs...

...Competition has forced gilding where none was needed...

...Brady and Wiman's new intimate revue...

...The Follies of the past have been as short on looks as they were long on skill and wit...

...This glance backward would be quite unnecessary if it were not needed to explain a curious lack in the present Follies...

...With the help of Mr...

...The dancing chorus is only fair, and does not live up to the promise of the new scenic standards...

...The title page and index for Volume IX of The Commonweal are now ready...

...If there is ever to be a rich blending of music and the dance, passing beyond the scope of the older ballets, the two media must be conceived together in the first instance...

...But—to repeat—the real trouble lies deeper...

...I do not deny the possibility of combining the tone poem and the dance into lyric drama, but I do feel very strongly convinced that the combining must be done at the time the music is composed, and with the intention of making each medium supplement the other, and without permitting either one to be subordinated to or limited by the other...

...Dorothy Sands has happily devoted herself to famous modern vampires (of the stage) such as Irene Bordoni and Lenore Ulric...

...Information on binding will be given upon application to the offices of The Commonweal...

...That is the only apparent way in which illusion can be created, instead of being partly achieved or wholly destroyed...

...To laugh at vice is perhaps childish and irresponsible, but is very different from snickering with it...

...Otherwise one will continue merely to limit the other...

...As to Miss Morgan's sketches, they are still inclined to take the easiest way—that is, to depend more on a risque point than on real wit, and most of them are much, much too long...

...It cannot be interpreted by scenery and the dance without limiting the vision it is intended to bring before us...

...There is a vast difference between poking fun at human failings and winking at them...

...There is a theory (which only time can establish as valid) that dance and pantomime can be brought to a perfection which will permit them to supplement and, in a sense, complete the images and emotions evoked by a great tone poem...

...A Broadway playhouse has done its share, too, in hardening a once flexible spirit...

...The "lyric dramas" formerly given on Grand Street were less ambitious, and, to that extent, more successful...

...The unexpected almost never happens until it is too late to be unexpected...

...not the war, but the parting of the ways between the Lewisohn sisters who had long paid the Grand Street deficit and the other half of the Neighborhood Playhouse which consisted of Agnes Morgan (not, I believe, a sister of Helen Morgan) and Helen Arthur...

...Miss Trueman is a little too harsh and staccato to give the complete illusion of Ruth Gordon in the same sketch...

...They approximated the older forms of ballet...

...The work of individuals in the group shows no abatement in quality...

...The general pattern of the show is still the same —a faint continuity as an excuse for viewing current plays from a bizarre angle—and the satire is still keen when it does not degenerate into an anaemic attempt at being Rabelaisian...

...The wit of today apparently gives way to that same nature, and men grow flabby with titters...

...Sokoloff's orchestra, and on the vast stage of the Manhattan Opera House, they have attempted this year to give a visual interpretation through dance and settings of Strauss's Heldenleben...

...These will be sent upon request...

...Unfortunately the themes of many of the sketches turn and twist about the supposedly fashionable immoralities of the day with that kind of grimace which is condoning rather than satirical...

...On the other hand, no synthetic mixture of atmospheres can ever dim the brilliancy of such individual performances as those of Paula Trueman, Dorothy Sands and Albert Carroll...

...The healthiest sign of all is to find something more important and more reasonable to laugh about...

...Not that the Lewisohns themselves ever held aloof from the fun...

...The Little Show /^ LIFTON WEBB, Romney Brent and a number of other V^ talented actors and actresses are grouped together in Messrs...

...But in the attempt to climb to Broadway standards they have reached only a middle rung...

...At the Booth Theatre...

...The present attempts seem to soar above realities, and in the intense effort to realize something "new," to neglect the slow processes by which a new form of art, or a union of older forms, must evolve...

...There is nothing wrong in either fact...

...When the two moods or attitudes met, the result was apt to be something as surpassingly fine as The Dybbuk or as tenderly poetical as The Little Clay Cart, or (which is the point of this brief history) as excruciatingly funny as the early Grand Street Follies...

...The present Follies have many of the scenic trappings of the more intimate Broadway reviews, and there is even an attempt to provide a small but comely chorus of dancers...

...But sometimes the most friendly act is to tell a mariner that you see rocks ahead of him, even if it turns out later that the rocks are all in your own imagination...

...On the other hand, when music is written in the first place with the intention of subserving the dance, the two media blend...

...One side of the house was intensely thoughtful and occasionally gay, the other side was light-heartedly energetic and occasionally thoughtful...

...Then came the war—no (I must have been reading J. W. Krutch's latest book on modern distemper...

...On the contrary, one of them sometimes donned wig and costume and joined in...

...In healthier days, wit had its way with human nature without becoming nasty, and laughter made men strong...

...Now they simply dive in from a flat shore, which means that the effort to repeat the mental abandon of former years is a bit synthetic...

...What is lacking chiefly is the inner exuberance which came from the annual spring reaction against consecration to Art...

...It was a sad parting in more ways than one, because it divorced two elements in the theatre which had complemented each other to good effect for years...

...Personally I feel that the effort must fail, not only along the lines of the Lewisohns' present endeavors, but along any other line which is primarily synthetic...

...So far as the technique of the intimate revue goes, this is probably the most successful effort Broadway has seen since the first Chariot Revue of three or four seasons back...

...But in another sketch, which is not even an attempt at impersonation, her disclosure of milady's deceptive toilette in the Age of Innocence is as sly and malicious a bit of comedy as the best pantomime of Charlie Chaplin...

...At the Music Box Theatre...

...But the whole company seemed formerly to use the serious days of winter as a spring-board from which to leap off...

...Instead of one becoming the "interpretation" of the other, both must combine from the outset to interpret a single great thought or emotional experience...

...If you recall the days when these Follies were really exhibited on Grand Street, and when they represented the vociferous explosion of young artists devoted for the long winter months to Dramatic Art (heavily capitalized) you will remember that while the wit and humor were seldom, of themselves, naive, the whole point of the evening was to be found in the play-boy attitude of the actors...

...The result is highly gratifying if you really want to see the tricks of those entertainers exposed to grim and merciless dissection...

...They were bubbling over with the delight of being let loose from the winter's Higher Aims, and were bent on spoofing New York's more pretentious shows for all they were worth...

...As a total production, the current show is (following the lament of the Hoboken heroine) "neither maid, wife nor widow...

...The Search for New Art THE partial vacuum in the Grand Street Follies is matched by a similar lack of balance in the efforts of the Lewisohn sisters to create a new art which shall be a combination of music and the dance...

...It is perhaps ungracious to speak this way of efforts that have only the highest motives and that are, in their way, inspiring as adventures...

...Perhaps the best illustrative comparison I can give is that of a sonata written for violin and piano...

...A blending of the two instruments is intended, and they do 78 THE COMMONWEAL May 22, 1929 blend...

...Their efforts to select and produce plays as well worked none too brilliantly...

...I say this because it stands for the most complete change of inner personality as well as outer resemblance...

...Fiske...

...In the outmoded language of Professor Jung, the Lewisohns were the introverted and the other two the extroverted side of a balanced combination...

...Today the Lewisohn sisters are devoting themselves exclusively to the search for New Art (with consequences noted below on this page) and Miss Morgan and Miss Arthur, with the nucleus of the old Neighborhood group, have become the Actor-Managers and the sole custodians of the Follies...

...It is precisely in the inability to realize this rather obvious necessity that the Lewisohns seem to work less well alone than in the older association at the Neighborhood Playhouse...

...The music is engaging, some of the sketches are excellent in their brevity, and the effect of lavish entertainment is provided with an astoundingly small cast and remarkably little scenic extravagance...

...The Follies are their great moment...

...Arrangements have been made for binding Volume IX in leather or cloth...

...Music of the tone-poem variety, which is intended to evoke images and to tell a story through the emotions, is a distinct medium...