(3 of 3)
Yoshe Kalb (by Fritz Blocki and Maurice Schwartz, from a novel by I. J. Singer; produced by Daniel Frohman). From 1880 to 1911, Daniel Frohman was one of Manhattan's most astute and successful theatrical producers. He started as a mailroom wrapper on the New York Tribune when Horace Greeley owned it, later became advance agent for Callender's Original Georgia Minstrels. When he started producing for himself, he gave David Belasco his first New York job, as stage manager, Frohman managed the late E. H. Sothern for nearly 25 years, leased the old Lyceum Theatre to house his famed stock company which played in such successes as The Wife, Lord Chumley, The Prisoner of Zenda. He also ran the famed old Madison Square Theatre at which Harry Thaw murdered Stanford White in 1906. His last production was The Seven Sisters in 1911, when he was 60. Since his retirement, he had kept himself occupied by collecting dolls, playing as many as 36 holes of golf in a day, dancing in cabarets until 4 o'clock in the morning and supporting a reputation for scrupulous promptness by carrying two watches. In his elaborate apartment over the Lyceum Theatre he sleeps on the floor because beds give him insomnia. His brother Charles went down on the Lusitania.
Yoshe Kalb was first performed last year in Maurice Schwartz's Yiddish Art Theatre in lower East Side Manhattan. It prospered when such uptowners as Noel Coward and Jed Harris went to see it, told friends about it. After 82-year-old Daniel Frohman saw it he was so impressed he could not sleep, even on the floor. When later he heard that it had been done into English, he telegraphed Actor-Manager Schwartz: ''May I have the honor to produce it?'' Replied Mr. Schwartz: "Yes.''
Yoslie Kalb is a sad story about a Jewish student (Horace Braham) who is seduced by the girl (Erin O'Brien-Moore ) whom a rabbi (Fritz Leiber) wants to marry and spends 15 years wandering about as Joe The Fool ("Yoshe Kalb"). Critics admired bits like a graveyard dance by an idiot girl and a candlelit trial of Joe The Fool for bigamy before 70 rabbis but found the rest dull, pompous, obscurely symbolical. After three nights. Mr. Frohman closed his first production in 22 years with an old man's sigh of dismay.
*Four weeks after The Lake started its successful London run last March, Co-author Massingham, recovering from influenza and a nervous breakdown, was found dead in a gas-filled room.
†The 1934 edition of the Philadelphia Social Register omits the names of Mr. and Mrs. Ludlow Ogden Smith.