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The Student Prince. A large male chorus swings steins in the air and opens the college drinking chant. The prince in disguise falls in love with a waitress. Excellent voices, elaborate scenery, a seasoning humor and easily audible music are comfortably combined.
The Little Clay Cart. That curious little back alley theatre, the Neighborhood Playhouse, pushed its memorable Grand Street Follies out of the way to do a Hindu play. A Hindu play sounds formidable, clogged with dead bodies floating down the Ganges and that sort of thing. As a matter of fact, most of the CART is comic. There are courtesans and kings, several scenes, no dramatic pyramiding as we know it. Rare colorings and scents of strange philosophies mingle swiftly with the laughter. Altogether a shrewd and sensitive experiment.
Princess April. One small and exceptionally amusing young lady, Dorothy Appleby by name; one prima donna of established repute, Tessa Kosta; one chorus that could dance; two or three tunes designed for repetition; and an exceptionally futile book. This is the sum of Princess April. So leaden a liability is this same book, so halting the hilarity, that the production is of doubtful destiny.
Lady, Be Good. When two or three people such as Fred and Adele Astaire and Walter Catlett are gathered together in the name of entertainment, the entertainment must be worthy of the name. Lady, Be Good is very good INDEED. Assisting the leaders is Cliff Edwards, who makes the simple ukelele an instrument of violent versatility, an agile and pictorial chorus, brilliant settings by Normal Bel-Geddes and music by George Gershwin. And, as if this weren't enough, the producers broke nearly all precedent and bought a large stock of new and most amusing jokes. "You're so beautiful," says Mr. Catlett to a certain lady, "that there have been complaints about you."
The Man in Evening Clothes. When a good idea falls to pieces like a human character suddenly crumbling, the spectacle is decidedly distressing. Such was the fate of a good idea in Henry Miller's production. In the first act, the bailiff gave the impecunious count only one suit from all his belongings. He chose his evening clothes and set out to find his fate. Of all the amusing whirligigs of drama that might have come tumbling out of this conception, few were employed.