(3 of 4)
great liar is entirely ignoble. J. Daniel Thompson, for instance, pretends for. the sake of his daughter's admiration, to be understudy to Richard Mansfield in Cyrano de Bergerac, whereas in reality he clanks chains and chews raw meat in the role of Wild Man at the 14th Street Palace of Living Wonders. Before that he was a vender of snake oil and Indian cure; and his compound sentences, derived from long professional practice, are rolled with an unctuous grandeur by George Hassell, who plays him to the last shake of his ponderous belly. You have the feeling that Thompson's lowly feathers are plucked from the same bird that gave Cyrano his white plume and that they are not much less pathetic for being so much more absurd. The audience wished only for something to happen to this charming old rogue to spur him out of what promised in the first two acts to be a bog of dialog. Baby Cyclone. Playwright George M. Cohan is an authority on husbands & wives. In his newest farce, he sets down that "whereas a woman has a whole bagful of tricks, a man has only one—the hat trick." This trick consists in the man's donning his hat and leaving his Mrs. alone for the night. It never fails. When three homes have been broken up by the three wives' passionately ogling and cuddling a little Pekinese dog, "Baby Cyclone" (so called because he was born in a storm), this simple "hat trick" succeeds in restoring the husbands to proper importance and the dog to the kennel.
Said Variety: "It should do for the Peke industry what The Captive did for violets."
The Mikado. Ever since his production last season of lolanthe, there has been a disposition among other producers to leave Gilbert & Sullivan to Winthrop Ames. How wise this policy is was demonstrated last week in the most tuneful of the Savoyard operettas, The Mikado. This opera is the one in which NankiPoo (William Williams), son of the Mikado of Japan (John Barclay), disguises himself as a wandering minstrel to woo Yum-Yum (Lois Bennett), ward and fiancee of the Lord High Executioner Ko-Ko (Fred Wright). By crossing the palm of the stately grafter, Pooh-Bah (William Gordon), whose ancestry is so proud that he was "born sneering," they avoid one tangle of legal red tape only to discover themselves enmeshed in another. Not till the exalted Mikado himself descends upon the scene does the complication resolve itself into matrimony.
A remarkable thing about this Mikado is the way it is staged. It has been sadly proved in the past that W. S. Gilbert's beautiful silliness that makes such alarming good sense when you come to think it over, and Arthur Sullivan's beguiling music can degenerate into oppressive bores. Mr. Ames sees to it that the stage keeps moving. His Mikado skips over huddles of prostrate subjects. His sonorous aristocrat, Pooh-Bah, is tantalized by lively, romping girls. The color combinations change and move, too, so vividly that the performance could fascinate a deaf-mute. Be sides there is a company of actors with unusually fine voices who have understanding hearts for the blithe spirit of Gilbert & Sullivan. Manhattan holds no sightlier, more in- telligent playfulness than theirs.