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Mountain Fury explains the malevolence which exists in the Alleghenies between the hill proletariat and the dale aristocracy. Naturally a dale-boy loves a hill-girl, to the accompaniment of baying hounds, tempests, a forest fire, murder, suicide, theft, and the bemused mumblings of a woodland lunatic.
George White's Scandals. A decade has passed since Producer White offered the first of his popular saturnalias. Still fired with ambition, he has inserted a song (Continued on p. 78)
(Continued from p. 40) Bigger and Better Than Ever in his anniversary Scandals. The tune is piffle; the sentiment is mere braggadocio. But he should again succeed, for he still knows how to polish the fleshpots. Once his girlish regiment sprawls on a beach, clad for maximum suntan. When costumes are more voluminous, engaging apertures are cut in them. Entrancing is a lady who stands vastly denuded, symbolic of the American Indian, and looks remarkably like Helen Wills.
Yellow-haired Frances Williams sings the show's best song, Bottoms Up, in her slithering, urgent voice. To this ditty Producer White dances a strenuous routine (successor to his Charleston, Black Bottom). The carnivals of Europe have inspired huge, mechanical grotesques which loom now and then behind the players — a shaggy Beast rolls its head and eyes while Beauty pirouettes; an enormous dummy jazz band swoops and sways. Meanwhile Willie Howard talks Jewish, and the Abbott dancers from Chicago tap dance on their toes. Ousted from the bed of a married woman, a clown exclaims : "Believe it or not, I'm a stowaway."
In his finale, Producer White and several members of his cast, dressed in rubber garments, descend into a large pool of water, emerge soaked and smiling.
Note
"The play . . . glorifies . . . an abject code of morals." With this comment did Mayor Malcolm E. Nichols of Boston recently forbid the Theatre Guild to present Eugene O'Neill's Strange Interlude in his city. Once again Bostonians applauded or flayed their potent, often-evidenced municipal censorship.
Last week the Theatre Guild announced it would play Strange Interlude seven miles away, in Quincy, Mass. Bostonians could easily motor, trolley. The Boston "purification" question might be brought to a head.