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Melody (words & music by Edward Childs Carpenter, Irving Caesar & Sig- mund Romberg; George White, producer). During a hiatus between Scandals, Producer White has turned his attention to operetta. This one is handsome, melodious, appealing to ear & eye rather than funnybone. It is the sort of play in which, by 11 o'clock, most of the actors are impersonating their grandchildren, for it begins in 1881, ends in 1933. Everett Marshall, having assisted Evelyn Herbert to cuckold her high-born husband on her wedding night, departs with French troops to Africa and is killed off early in Act I. But Producer White has another expensive baritone, Walter Woolf. ready to step into the breach and lush, blonde Miss Herbert is happily reincarnated, thus holding the stage to the end. If you are patient and like Romberg music, you should enjoy yourself at Melody.
One Sunday Afternoon (by James Hagan; Leo Peters & Leslie J. Spiller, producers). Here is a play sure in its unpretentious telling of a wholesome, sometimes humorous, sometimes moving story. A frieze of homely figures on a Mid-western ground, One Sunday Afternoon opens in the shabby dental parlor of Biff Grimes. D. D. S. (Lloyd Nolan, an able new-comer). Stimulated by an old crony, a bottle of rye and innumerable repetitions of "in the good old summer time." Biff's imagination reaches sadly back to his youth in another little town. Nostalgia gives way to intemperate anger when he thinks of the injustices he received at the hands of rich Hugo Barnstead. The telephone rings. The affluent Mr. Barnstead is in the hotel just across the street, stricken with toothache. When he appears for treatment there is considerable doubt whether the angry Biff, gas cap in hand, will ever let him out of the operating chair alive. There is a fadeback and the audience is presented with the case history.
Biff really wanted to marry Virginia. His chances looked good for a while until Hugo swept her off her feet in Schneider's beer garden. On the rebound, inarticulate, dazed Biff married Amy (Francesca Bruning). Followed a row with Hugo in Hugo's uncle's factory and a two-year jail term for Biff.
When lie got out. he and Amy moved away. Amy was good to him. They lived comfortably. And yet, a still small voice kept telling Biff, if he had married Virginia, somehow life would not have been quite so mediocre.
Biff does not kill Hugo. Virginia, whose hair has grown blonde and her tongue sharp, grudgingly comes to watch her husband lose another cuspid. So grateful is Biff for the relief of his disillusionment that he does not charge Hugo a cent for the extraction. He dismisses the quarreling couple, picks up his faithful Amy. tells her she has the best legs in town, decides to buy a new car.