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Fiesta. Written by Michael Gold, editor of the proletarian New Masses, this play tells of an elite Mexican revolutionist who tries to engender ambition in the peons on his ranch. The scheme fails when his bright-eyed little protege, whom he views as symbolic, neglects her lessons, steals away to a fiesta, is there seduced by his dashingly reactionary brother. Often stupidly acted, full of foolish, obscene dialog, it is not an auspicious beginning for the esthetic Provincetown Players, who have moved uptown this season from Greenwich Village to the outskirts of blazing Broadway. Clevelanders visiting Manhattan will not be disappointed, however, in the performance of tall Carl Benton Reid, erstwhile bulwark of Cleveland's Playhouse repertory company.
A Strong Man's House. Strong will -too much Shelley = idealism. This is the equation by which dramatists create moral young men who then proceed to annoy the rest of the cast. Roy Hamerman (Lester Vail) was such an irritant. Aged 23, he fell heir to a vast Midwestern barony which his shrewd father, newly dead of angina pectoris, had acquired by almost feudal extortions and chicanery. Things thus looked bad for his father's trained nurse, a vivid girl (Mary Nash) whose principles were as elastic as those of her late patient. Roy knew she had blackmailed his father. But he was a reformer, and he was also so unfortunate as to love her. "You marry me," he said, "or you'll go to jail."
For a while it seemed the play might be a wise study of what happens to meddle- some people who try to transmute base metals. But in the end the girl, imbued with love, turned saintly and Roy, helped by an upright lawyer, bade fair to rid the city of corruption. Lee Wilson Dodd's play thus becomes folk-drama of the more maudlin sort.
The Street Singer. So successfully did" a gentlemen named Busby Berkeley arrange dance routines for the Brothers Shubert that he ventured producing a show of his own. The result is a great deal of ardent hoofing amid elegantly painted views of Paris. You witness the happy rise of blithe little Queenie Smith from gamine to ballerina. You hear droll Andrew Tombes, disguised as a vendor of French postcards, pass such remarks as this comment on a bald man: "What a tall face!" Evoking many such blandishments, Producer Berkeley qualifies as an expert in pleasant, flowery entertainment.