Katy Did is a harmless little play with scant humor and a musical comedy plot. A waitress at Childs picks up a vagrant foreigner and marries him the next day. She sets him up first as a dishwasher, then as a bootlegger. When the rest of the cast arrive with the news that he is the King of Suavia, everybody merrily turns bootlegger including the Suavian Ambassador.
One for All. An impecunious, consumptive scientist needs $900 to perfect his tuberculosis remedy. His good wife earns just that sum by vending her virtue to the villain. Her subsequent endless remorse is no more awful than the boredom of the audience. The play is embellished by glimpses into dens of vice along Riverside Drive.
Oh Ernest. As sodden and pale as a 10¢-portion of mashed potatoes is this musical comedy adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s gay farce The Importance of Being Earnest. Wildian epigrams frolic beside such lines as “My Rolls is waiting; so is my coffee.” Sometimes the dancing is agreeable.
He Loved the Ladies is the most horribly acted play in Manhattan. The plot: A maiden, born sub rosa, inherits the millions of her father. Fortunately for her social pretensions, he also leaves letters to prove he was the intermittent paramour of nearly every respected matron in town.
Julie. “Thees Pierre, ‘e iz one dam fine bootlaig, mais nevaire, nevaire will I make ze marriage wiz him” is the type of dialogue that drove many of the audience home at the end of Act II. Some remained to snicker at tense moments. The plot involves a drunken Canuck mother who sells her daughter, Julie, to a bootlegger for two cases of Scotch. There is also the stalwart Yankee youth who saves the girl over the disapproval of his tight little mother, and a bady who did not belong to Julie after all.
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