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Called upon to carry more than her just share of At Home Abroad, Comedienne Lillie demonstrates the full extent of her resource and range by thrice repeating, with unimportant changes of scene and material, her most famed characterization: the ludicrous femme fatale. First a Parisian music hall favorite ("l'amour, the merrier"), then a temperamental ballerina with painful recollections of her flight from Russia ("You can't teach an old dog new treks"), she tops the lot as a light lady of Vienna with this lyrical self-analysis:
I'm the toast of Vienna
And most of Vienna
Can boast
It's been host
To the toast of Vienna.
Except for Beatrice Lillie, there is not a great deal for anyone else in the company to do. A spectator who gets in after the third scene hears droll Herb Williams (The Farmer Takes a Wife) open his mouth exactly three times. For Eddie Foy Jr., who can at least imitate a seal better than anyone else in the U. S. theatre, there is no profitable employment whatever. Most of the skit work is taken over by a British newcomer named Reginald Gardiner who imitates trains, dirigibles, steamships. Other features of an evening of fair fun: the dancing feet of Eleanor Powell, back from Hollywood where they clipped off her bangs, frizzed her hair, enameled her face and made her look like all the other Hollywood girls; the singing laugh of Ethel Waters in a series of tunes strongly reminiscent of her As Thousands Cheer melodies; the slightly unsteady gyrations of Dancer Paul Haakon. Among the good tunes, some of which thrifty Messrs. Schwartz & Dietz have salvaged from their Ivory Soap radio program: Love Is a Dancing Thing, Got a Bran' New Suit, O Leo.
Life's Too Short (by John Whedon & Arthur Caplan; Jed Harris, producer) tells the tale of a man named Fowler (John B. Litel) and his wife Helen (Doris Dalton) in "the great days of the New Deal." Fowler loses his job and Helen goes back to her old boss (Leslie Adams) who also happens to be her old lover. By successfully fooling himself as to his, his wife's and his boss's motives, Fowler does not find it hard to take up his old job again when it is offered. Anyhow, life is too short to worry about those things. In his own little tragic triumph, Fowler, the White Collar Man, is satisfied.
Informal and at times irrelevant, the play's dialog is of that bitter, witty sort that bubbles up behind the footlights, falls flat on paper. Sample:
"Let's drink to the New Deal."
"Nuts to the New Deal. Let's drink to Calvin Coolidge."
Thoughtful drama observers, who believe that to be healthy the Theatre should be sensitive to the times, predicted that Life's Too Short was the beginning of a long series of plays alert to problems of social justice but more fitted for popular consumption than last season's rash of "agitprop" (TIME, June 17).