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At times, it is a rabid effort at the sensational. It gives little real opportunity to Miss Keane, except to show her gifts as a quick-change artist. Amid the lustrous costumes, she is a cake of soap, foaming and floating among its own prismatic bubbles. A large and untiring cast utter the feverishly banal dialog incessantly.
Sky High. This show is like a pair of renovated shoes—its polish is new, its cracks are old. It flashes through a series of pedal acrobatics-farandoles, shuffles, clogs, hornpipes, jigs. Many light-legged ladies agilely provide that atmosphere of deviltry which always overwhelms the very old and the very young at the sight of 20 or more female limbs rapidly manipulated to music. Occasionally William Howard, comedian of the monocle school, advances to the footlights in order to lure back those holders of seats who have begun to make determined, surreptitious exits on all fours up the centre aisle. He imitates Harry Lauder, Al Jolson, Eddie Cantor; he sings, with extraordinary results, a philosophic anthem entitled Let It Rain; he surmises that a talkative lady "must have been vaccinated with a phonograph needle"; when confronted by a man who professes to have sprung from a long line of peers, he says: "And I've leaped from a few docks myself"; when asked if he knows the King's English, he replies that so was the Prince of Wales. There is a Victor Herbert waltz; Dorothy McNulty dances with graceful velocity; Miss Joyce Barbour contributes a patrician presence; Vannessi, the stupidest-looking beautiful woman on the U. S. stage, rolls her eyes.
Michel Auclair. This play, sponsored by the Provincetown group, is a pledge of lost hopes, a souvenir of misshapen direction. The author (Charles Vildrac) is a sort of French Barrie, here perverted into a casual Ibsen. He makes a pretty world for himself out of nice books and brotherly love, ruling out the flesh and the devil. His hero is a young man who is both those Siamese twins of psychology, Dr. Coue and Dr. Frank Crane. The idealist returns from a year in Paris to his village and, finding his fiancee the wretched wife of a doltish sergeant, fulfills his philosophy by helping them to untangle the kinks in their jarring nervous systems.
The cast play it in a shuffling fashion. Edgar Stehli as the idealist, Walter Abel as the sergeant and Helen Freeman as the wife were like mushrooms nodding underground. The slight piece would make a shimmering curtain-raiser, if the cast were whipped up into playing it more smartly.
Pierrot the Prodigal. Not for over a year has the voice of Laurette Taylor been heard on the stage, nor was it heard when, after this long silence, she returned last week to play the title role of this pantomime by Michel Carre, to the music of Andre Wormser. Through three acts which deal with the fragile adventures of poor Pierrot who runs away with one Phrynette, returns home in tears, no player speaks a word. Miss Taylor's face is a painted mask of eternal, baffled laughter, of moon-blanched sorrow; her gestures are eloquent, her insight unfailing. George Copeland, famed pianist, upholds the glittering pattern of gesture with subtle rhythms.