Great Day. Vincent Youmans, composer of such infectious songs as "Tea for Two," "Sometimes I'm Happy'' and "Hallelujah," presents his country with several remarkable airs in this bromidic and tedious musicomedy about a Southern lass (Mayo Methot) whose ancestral mansion is sold for a gambling house. Needless to say, a comely Northerner (Alan Prior) eases her heart. Two of Composer Youman's best tunes, the lingering "Without A Song," the jubilant "Great Day," are magnificently reverberated by an Afric choir of 40 voices led by Mr. Lois Deppe. Other Youmans' melodies which will soon reach ballroom and loudspeaker: "Happy Because I'm In Love," "More Than You know," "Open Up Your Heart."
Lolly. Two flies, one mechanical and one temperamental, have long been present in the ointment of fashionable Manhattan theatre-goers. Mechanically, it is impossible to dine at 8 o'clock and see the first act of any play. Temperamentally, it is annoying not to know in advance whether the play will be sad or amusing, a problem or a diversion.
To remove these flies is the purpose of a socialite undertaking called the New York Theatre Assembly, which has now presented the first of a series of "amusing plays, in an intimate theatre, before a selected audience." The curtain rises at 9 o'clock. The play, by Fannie Heaslip Lea, describes the love affairs of two men, two women and a gigolo. Mary Young, expert in the impersonation of giddy dowagers (Dancing Mothers, Gypsy) is beset by the gigolo (Alberto Carrillo), and only escapes when her girlhood suitor (Hugh Miller), upon whom her family had frowned, returns after two decades of desperate forgetfulness in South America. In their hot youth he had gotten the matron with daughter, a hard-boiled maiden who throughout the play symbolizes the modern girl. These conventionalities are accented by pleasant dialog which attains such epigrammatic heights as: "Children should be the result of love, not love the result of children." Convinced that it had amused, the Assembly announced that subsequent plays would be in the Lolly genre.
On the opening night the Assembly emphasized its éclat with a platoon of Manhattan debutantes who served as ushers. The program listed a committee of Founders including: Mrs. William De Rham, Mrs. Adrian Iselin II, Mrs. Junius Morgan, Mrs. Kenneth M. Murchison, Mrs. William Church Osborn, Mrs. Herbert L. Satterlee. Executive director is Walter Greenough, longtime socio-dramatic entrepreneur.