Dixie to Broadway. Another machine gun of the show business has opened up on the line. It is a Negro musical comedy with Florence Mills directing the fire. Experts assert that the new contrivance shoots the fastest of all its kind.
It differs from earlier Negro models in elaborateness of dress. Money and a mild amount of taste have gone into the manufacture.
Speed and decoration have overwhelmed slightly the humor of the evening. Hamtree Harrington is hired to induce hysterics and is not as thoroughly ridiculous as he has been previously. His material rather than his method seemed at fault.
Florence Mills, who made sheer impudence an explosive factor of success, retains her frantic popularity. She is seconded by Shelton Brooks, Cora Green and Will Vodery's band. But it 'is the chorus that carries the motion.
Heywood Broun—"The most exciting of all the musical comedies now current in New York."
Alexander Woollcott — "A dressy, rapid, ordinary musical show that happens to have employed colored folk for its songs and dances."
The Rising Son is a family matter with the name Nugent on the invitations. J. C, Elliott and Ruth Nugent, best recalled for Kempy, tell another of their artless histories and in the telling unloose a moderate amount of laughter.
Toward the end of the second act, the novelist father discovers that his cook is his own mother. Previously, it seems, he has been a humble and happily ignorant Irish youth with an itch to write stories. He made money easily enough, but was always worried about the college education he had missed. His son was to go to college and proceed from there to the composition of deathless literature instead of the ephemeral magazine humor which paid the family bills so promptly. The son preferred business. Only his affection for a girl who could write palliated his father's incredulous discomfiture.
The vaudeville experience of J. C. Nugent is usually visible through the fabric of the manuscript. His lack of simplicity and directness of attack on a full-length play diffuse the cumulative effect. His playing is characteristic. Elliott Nugent contrives miraculously to look and talk in a manner actually reminiscent of college boys. Ruth Nugent is pretty and Mary Shaw gives a notable performance as the Irish cook.
Alexander Woollcott—"A strangely miscellaneous comedy. . . . The Marxes remain our favorite American family."
The New York Times—"A good deal that is genuinely entertaining."
Follies, Fall Edition. Mr. Ziegfeld has caused to have inserted in the daily press tidings that henceforth the Follies will remain in Manhattan the year 'round. To the end that their popularity shall not diminish, he reports that three times after the opening he will invigorate the exercises with new material. The first of these invigorations is now on sale. The new ingredients are the Russian Lilliputians and Mitty and Tillio, French dancers; a pair of athletes called the Athenas; and new acts for Vivienne Segal, Lupino Lane, and minor revision in the monolog of Will Rogers.
Both the Lilliputians and Mitty and Tillio are regarded in Paris as belonging to the enthusiastic category of the "wows." In the Ziegfeld Follies, they seemed only pretty good. The former did a wooden soldiers march that might have created feverish rejoicing if wooden soldiers had not already marched so many miles