Oh, Please! From that sad wreck, the once scintillant Charlot's Revue, they have salvaged two treasures: Gertrude Lawrence who enchants the multitudes in Oh, Kay (TIME, Nov. 22) and Beatrice gillie who makes all men laugh in Oh, Please! The latter vehicle is a rickety contraption, muscial comedy, about an actress who invades the home of the President of the Purity League while his wife is on leave of absence. Apparently the Dillingham production executives tossed Miss Lillie the script with its two good songs ( Nicodemus" and "You Know That I Know ) and its feeble lines, and told her to see what she could with it. In its profound inanity she discovers as many laughs as are to be heard in one theatre anywhere along Broadway. Gowned in a Turkish towel, she warbles her hopelessly ridiculous songs, wrestles with Purity League President Bliss, flops on her other end with the savoir faire and polite restraint of a duchess, with a twinkling in her two eyes merrier than all the unbridled hilarity in the audience. While Miss Lillie is not tumbling about, there are laughs for Actor Charles Winninger and laughs for Actress Helen Broderick in their marital-musical scene of reconciliation.
The Great Adventure. Reginald Pole a Western actor, revives Arnold Bennett's play full of infinitesimal subtleties for the infinite satisfaction of folk who like Arnold Bennett on the stage. An artist who would be known to the world by his work only, changes places with his valet. The valet dies suddenly. The artist goes on painting, marries a bourgeois little widow. Their life is disturbed when the artist is rediscovered by professional collectors. The problem of the play is to make the wife realize that the man she married for a butler is really an artist.
The Silver Cord. It matters little to Playwright Sidney Howard that Ned McCobb's Daughter (TIME, Dec. 13) must give way on alternate weeks to The Silver Cord. He wrote them both, is one of the few who have had two plays produced by the Theatre Guild in the same season. His new opus is a pungent satire savagely directed against the popular sentimentality that breathes violet perfume on "mother love." A wit in the audience loudly announced after the curtain line "Now to go home and shoot mother! "
The Honor of the Family.
H. Balzac wrote the story. E. Fabre made a play out of it. P. Potter put it into English. O. (Otis) Skinner makes it presentable in Manhattan today. Mr. Skinner wears the same faded regimentals that he sported 19 years ago; he is the same swaggering bon-vivant of a Napoleonic colonel with the old flourishes. The flourishes satisfy, but the plot leaves a stale taste. In a curtain speech after the third act, Mr. Skinner smilingly reveals his intention of reviving the play again in 1946. Actor Skinner will be 88 in 1946.