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They sat through what is certainly one of the most expensive preparations ever put up, a luxurious operetta about Africa. Dawn, high priestess of native religion, loves an heroic Englishman. Unhappily she is in the power of a gigantic local Negro, planning to elope with her. African life seems darkest just before Dawn discovers she is white; may marry as she, and the audience, prefer. Louise Hunter was wheedled away from the Manhattan Opera House to sing this part and sing it she does as parts are seldom sung in operetta. Her assistants are eminently vocal and the surroundings dressed in many glowing colors. Lacking only briskness Golden Dawn is the early winter's most eminent sample of its type.
2X2 = 5 (Civic Repertory Theatre). In Denmark live contented cows. No one has been unhappy since Hamlet. Or so you feel at this playful Danish version of the proposition that life is illogical. The plot traces the transformations of a mad-ap schoolteacher into a story editor and of his wife from a married spinster into a lady right out of the silk hosiery advertisements. There is a whiff of degeneracy here and there in the proceedings but it is innocuous, like mold on cream cheese. Pale Eva LeGallienne, mistress of the Civic Repertory, has entrusted the piece to Director Egon Brecher, a quizzical associate of long standing. He handles play and players in the Tony Sarg manner. The entire cast jerk and jostle through the gleeful evening like life-sized marionettes, with a giddy promptness that makes it seem as though all were improvised. Miss LeGallienne is paradoxically absent from the cast; Mr. Brecher, providentially, present. Storm Center is an inconsequential little farce about a married couple who buy a house in the country. The first act exhibits the difficulties of packing up and moving out. The second act exhibits the difficulties of unpacking and moving in. In the last act they sell the house. The result suggests that a few capable character actors employed two docile writers to construct a drama in which there would be a part for each. They wring considerable laughter out of dried up situations.
Harry Delmar's Revels. The process of glorifying one Harry Delmar, vaudevillian, was duly inaugurated last week. Dully, too, in spots. Other spots included a jovial pony ballet; a vulgar song that grossly libels the Revolutionary hero Paul Revere; various deft dancers; Frank Fay, one of the few high-voiced comedians who can induce hysterics.
The Centuries. On the stage of a tiny Greenwich village theatre are set a series of platforms to represent the rooms of a smelly tenement. Through these rooms wanders the disjointed, often dismembered, saga of the sorrows of a Jewish immigrant family. Poverty, graft, prostitution, suicide are a few of the woes that befall. The play is given by The New Playwrights, all of whose theatricals are in the most modern manner. The New Playwrights do not cater to the general public; nor, in general, the public to The New Playwrights.