Night of January 16 (by Ayn Rand; A. H. Woods & Lee Shubert, producers) repeats the theatrical trick which, in The Trial of Mary Dugan, made Producer Woods a tidy fortune in 1927-28. A crime has been committed before the audience arrives, is thereafter unraveled in a long-drawn courtroom scene. The crime which took place on the night of Jan. 16 concerns a fictional Swede named Bjorn Faulkner, who bears a close resemblance to a real Swede named Ivar Kreuger. Faulkner had built a financial empire largely through finagling on a grand scale. He and a secretary-mistress named Karen Andre (Doris Nolan) arrive in Manhattan where he sets her up in a penthouse. After the Crash he finds that he has only one asset left, his personable self, which he is willing to trade in marriage to the daughter of a big U. S. moneyman if her father will lend him $25,000,000. Not long after this alliance, a man's body with a bullet through it comes hurtling down from the Faulkner penthouse and Karen Andre is put on trial for Faulkner's murder. Was it murder? Was it suicide? Was the body Faulkner's?
These questions and a number of others are answered by a novelty which goes The Trial of Mary Dugan one better. As each male spectator buys his ticket for Night of January 16, he is offered the chance of serving on the play's jury, receiving a fee of $3.* The jurors selected are marched up on the stage soon after the curtain rises, there sit in a box throughout the performance, return their verdict after retiring to the wings for a vote.
On opening night the jury seemed to have been packed by an astute pressagent. A verdict of "Not Guilty" was returned by twelve good men & true including Jack Dempsey, Colonel John Reed Kilpatrick of Madison Square Garden and Edward J. Reilly, the Brooklyn lawyer who failed to get Richard Bruno Hauptmann acquitted. In the play's first week, less celebrated jurors convicted beauteous Actress Nolan only once. Author Rand is prepared for either decision. If the defendant is acquitted, the judge berates the jury for a bad decision. If she is convicted, defense asks for a new trial, the judge grants it.
At Home Abroad (words & music by Howard Dietz & Arthur Schwartz; Shuberts, producers). Informally threaded around a couple who become so bored with the ubiquitousness of such U. S. personages as John D. Rockefeller and Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt that they flee on a world tour, this "musical holiday" has no less than 25 numbers. Beatrice Lillie appears in about one out of every three. If the measure of a comic is the extent to which she is superior to her material, Comedienne Lillie rates second to none. Whether she is impersonating a British gentlewoman, an Alpinist, a geisha, a barmaid or a star-crossed lover in a railway station, she never fails to convey by a twinkle in her eye, a snicker, a gesture, that she is enjoying quite as much as the audience the fool she is making of herself.