The Play

...Miss Rethberg was the Donna Elvira, and despite her beautiful voice seemed a little heavy for Mozart's music...

...But it is his own inimitable skill and polish which bring out the living values of the old work and restore a vast deal of its original glamour...

...But none of this year's audience, or precious little of it, ever saw Maurel or even Renaud in the part, and it was abundantly and perhaps justifiably pleased...

...William Gillette is co-author of the play based upon Conan Doyle's famous character...

...Here at any rate was Mozart...

...Golden is roundly patted on the back for saving the American drama and using Sapolionic efforts to keep the stage clean...

...Gigli...

...He has a right, therefore, to feel no small measure of satisfaction in the long life this play has had...

...More than that, it reveals the source (inspirational, at least) of so much that has wandered upon the stage since the day that Sherlock first captured public imagination...

...How and why he becomes reconciled to this fate, after indulging in far more fanciful projects, and how his domestic differences are settled for him at the same time, form the slim substance of the play...

...John Golden would protest less audibly concerning the cleanliness of the plays he produces, one's gratitude toward him would be far more sincere and spontaneous...

...And what an interesting figure he makes at his advanced age-erect, agile, the representative of all that is best in the trouper tradition, with that gentle touch of sardonic humor playing about his mouth and eyes that look tolerantly down the years...

...Let us hope that it has returned to the Metropolitan to take its place in the regular repertoire...

...He was not an aristocratic Don Giovanni, but rather a handsome parvenu...

...Like many similar plays, most of its humor depends on the old wise-crack material between husband and wife, on fits of temper and broken dishes, on embattled pride in small heads and on a surrounding character atmosphere of village types...

...The play emerges from the storehouse of time and stock company production as singularly alive...

...Many mystery plays of today are lineal descendants of Conan Doyle's stories-but not of this particular play...

...Of course there would have been no Maurice Renaud to play the Don, but then there was none in the current production, just as there was no such Masetto as Charles Gilibert...

...The lonely gas house, the underground criminal rendezvous seem a little overdrawn and unnecessary in days like these when criminal wealth, fed from liquor profits, easily affords delightful apartments and gilded trappings...

...The audience is in on the whole secret...

...Ludikar knew the style in which Leporello should sing, even if he did not always attain it, and Louis D'Angelo was amusing as Masetto...

...Given half a chance, he is an unfailing source of fun...

...One thinks of him in such poignant plays as Dear Brutus, and wonders just where, in the present generation of realistic actors, one will find, three or four decades from now, a personality of equal charm and distinction and understanding...

...But even old pudding recipes can be tasty in the hands of a good cook...

...Surely the present cast is no more capable than would have been half a dozen other possible casts since Oscar Hammerstein gave it at the old Manhattan Opera House in the season of 1907-1908...

...I prefer to think that cleanliness can bring its own reward-unadvertised-as in such cases as Philip Barry's Holiday...

...and it is a bitter commentary on the present state of music to have Signor Gatti-Casazza offer the reason that there were no singers to sing it...

...Una Merkel- the slate-pencil-voiced companion of Helen Hayes in Coquette -does a familiar turn as a lovesick village belle, and those two veterans, Claude Cooper and James C. Lane, live up to their familiar best...

...John Horner descendant of a race of seamen, has wanted all his life to sail deep water...

...He has an irritating habit of making at least one of his actors break the illusion of the play midway with a curtain speech, in which Mr...

...But the real triumph of the evening was the conducting of Signor Serafin...

...At the John Golden Theatre...

...The Don of Ezio Pinza was a little lacking in flexibility of voice and a good deal lacking in subtlety, yet on the whole he gave an adequate performance...

...Stock companies have been playing it all over the land...

...There is just enough salt and flavor in Salt Water to make the evening pass most delightfully...

...Gillette is admirably supported by Peg Entwistle as the unhappy Alice Faulkner and a group of excellent character actors...

...In a mystery play, the whole technique is different...

...The present play, by Dan Jarrett, has the charm of real homeliness and a not entirely threadbare setting...

...It would be unfair, of course, to draw a comparison with that newer type of thriller-the mystery play...

...I say as originally announced, for Rosa Ponselle was to have sung Donna Anna, and her illness forced the substitution of Leonora Corona, a singer of very limited talent, who proved utterly inadequate in one of the most difficult roles of all opera...

...It is only in its outmoded setting of crime, then, that Sherlock Holmes requires a little good-natured cooperation on the part of the audience...

...First of all there is Frank Craven himself-always himself, one might say...

...It is, in many respects, too bad that Gillette, with his perfect type adaptation to the famous detective, did not collaborate in a series of Sherlock Holmes plays, some of them in the form of true mystery tales...

...THE PLAY By RICHARD DANA SKINNER Concerning Sherlock Holmes THE current revival of Sherlock Holmes, with the seventy-four-year-old veteran, William Gillette, himself heading the cast, brings back more than memories...

...It was he who managed through the power of his personality to weld the performance into a perfect whole, to bring the spirit of Mozart from the orchestra and often even from the singers...

...Familiar materials are always delightful in new combinations, or when done to the right turn...

...Yet with these exceptions the cast as originally announced by Signor Gatti-Casazza was fully the equal, and in some respects the superior, of the one of 1907-1908...

...The Return of Don Giovanni IT IS incredible that Don Giovanni should have been absent from the American operatic stage for twenty-two years...

...The dramatic situations themselves, even though most of them are familiar stage tricks, have ample vitality to challenge any modern detective play...

...She sang the music with style, and acted with gusto and lightness...

...Mystery stories are horses of another color...

...The play itself has antique moments only in the sense of certain stage conventions which have altered in recent years...

...Don Giovanni is one of the three or four greatest operas of the world...

...For whatever the shortcomings of individual artists, the Metropolitan's Don Giovanni was a unit, and unity has not of recent years always been an attribute of the performances there...

...Aside from this offensive exploitation, Salt Water, with Frank Craven as its star, is an acceptable and very amusing successor to Pigs, Two Girls Wanted and several other famous Golden productions...

...Then there is Edythe Elliott as John Horner's stake in matrimony-as engaging as she is irritating...

...With the exception of Donna Anna, there was no character which was not at least presentably given...

...It has required twenty-two years for Signor Gatti-Casazza to take his courage in both hands and present it at the Metropolitan Opera House, yet the result, while not perhaps brilliant, was satisfying enough to cause one to wonder why it was not done long before...

...Miss Ponselle is probably the only artist now at the Metropolitan who will go down into history as one of the great singers of all time...

...Unlike many of the Holmes stories in book form, the play sticks to a direct battle of wits between Hoftnes and a known criminal opponent...

...We are apt to consider as old-fashioned and unrealistic any play in which criminals are more or less segregated...

...The most beautiful singing of the evening was accomplished by Mr...

...Two-thirds of the suspense then rests on keeping the audience in darkest ignorance of the real criminal...

...In addition to all this personality flavor, the play itself has enough suspense and good-natured meandering to complete the dish...

...At the New Amsterdam Theatre...

...It is worth a thousand Toscas and Pagliaccis...

...It is of the present as well as the past...

...The present event at the New Amsterdam theatre is less a revival of the play than a return and farewell engagement of Mr...

...Salt Water IF ONLY Mr...

...Our audiences naturally understand crime best in the unique surroundings it has found under prohibition...

...Grenville Vernon...

...And the nearest he ever comes to his dream is in becoming skipper of a six-minute ferry boat from Sag Harbor to Long Island...

...Had Miss Ponselle appeared, New York might have listened to one singer at least who would not have been unworthy of the great casts of the past, and we have that experience to look forward to in future performances...

...The nearest he has come to this is selling pop-corn and peanuts on the Albany night boat...

...Miss Fleischer's Zerlina was the most effective of the three women's performances...

...For it has never really died...

...One is just perverse enough to suspect that he is capitalizing cleanliness a little unfairly-like the schoolboy who expects a nickel every time he washes behind his ears...

...We have simply the old battle between hero and villain over the heroine-the mechanics of straight melodrama...