The Fireman's Flame (written and produced by Jerrold & John Krimsky respectively) is for beer drinkers in a whiskey mood. It records a seething rivalry between two rival fire companies in Manhattan's 80s; the love of an heir long lost for the ward of a Wall Street "fox"; the evil designs of two villains upon the fox's fortunes; the inevitable triumph of integrity. In the course of the fustian action, a locket is spirited from a painted backdrop bureau, hot villainous breath ruffles ostrich feathers on a period hat, a ticker tape registers cataclysmic unsteadiness in railroad stocks; eight Fire Belles dance with breathless abandon, and two fire engines race to a fire.
The American Music Hall, now housing its fourth bumpkin melodrama, used to be a church. Last week it was revealed that twelve deceased ex-parishioners have left legacies to an edifice no longer sacred; and the producers' consciences have been pricked by quarterly donations from the American Bible Society. But if the Brothers Krimsky are as successful with The Fireman's Flame as they have been with their previous ventures in the genre, Murder in the Old Red Barn and Naughty-Naught ('00), they will need no further alms.
Brother John, business head, and Brother Jerrold, literary partner, did research for their piece in the Museum of the City of New York, took as a pseudonym for Melodramatist Jerrold: John Van Antwerp Van Ostend.
The Music Hall's audiences are seated at tables, served anything they think they can stand, usually continue their fun at a bar downstairs after the show. Though more sophisticated than Broadway cabaret crowds, they have made so much cheer-&-jeer noise in the past that neighbors of the ex-church have complained. The Krimskys, on probation, must periodically pledge decorum to a deputy police commissioner.
To Quito and Back (by Ben Hecht; produced by the Theatre Guild, Inc.). Despite the undeniable flash and detonation of the salvo of Ben Hecht epigrams on love, social justice et al., with which the Theatre Guild saluted the opening of its 20th season last week, Manhattan play-goers found To Quito and Back largely a talkfest in the Andes, detected in Author Hecht's author-hero an unhappy hesitance and uncertainty.
A breathtaking, gloriously pell-mell first scene packs the essential people of the play—the wife-&-world-fleeing Alexander Sterns (Leslie Banks), the other woman (Sylvia Sidney), and a British consular official (Francis Compton)—out of a thronged Andean railway station and off for Quito by automobile in company with Zamiano (Joseph Buloff), peasant leader of an anti-Fascist revolt.
Not long thereafter, however, the play bogs down under the weight of its own rhetoric at a villa outside Quito, where Sterns helps Zamiano direct his revolution while others at the villa plot against it. and Miss Sidney, in an anomalous position when Sterns's wife fails to divorce him, beats frantically and ineffectually against the bars of circumstance. Sterns, brilliantly convincing to those about him, finally solves his own indecisions in a quixotic last act gesture, dying with the valiant Zamiano in a forlorn last stand against the Fascists.