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Tommy. Playwrights Howard Lindsay and Bertrand Robinson have hit upon an intriguing situation: a boy in love with a girl, the girl in love with him, the wedding bells dumb because the girl's parents also favor the match. Once the hero succeeds in irritating the parents into objecting, the heroine's vast desire for a gesture of romantic rebellion is gratified and the wedding accomplished. What the playwrights have done with this tempting situation is, first, to build up an impressive number of ingenious but superficial complications, explaining each little complication as it approaches, when it arrives, after it has departed, so that not the least in the audience will be deprived of his mite; then, to sugar-coat the whole with a lovable uncle who pets the cat and helps along the matrimony. When Broadway's last niece and nephew have chortled with childish glee over Tomany, it will probably be seized upon by all the stock companies throughout the land. Juvenile William Janney, Ingenue Peg Entwistle, Character Actors Lloyd Neal and Sidney Toler do well.
Piggy features Sam Bernard for the many who find joy in his sputtering-and-raging farcicality In this instance, as the plutocratic Mr. Hoggenheimer, he is bent upon forcing his son to marry a title but finally consents to true love with a shop girl. The best part of the show is the dancing chorus. Few stages can boast such dashing sweeps of color and movement. John Boyle created them.
The Arabian Nightmare is frankly a "fantastic comedy" (i.e. farce) of two variously aged spinstresses who quit Amesbury, Mass., for a glimpse of sheiks and harems in the desert. There they are tumbled about by means of a superabundance of stage gags so long standardized that the Manhattan first nighters knew just where to laugh. The surprise of the performance was Helen Lowell. In the serious part of the wife in God Loves Us earlier this season she won praise. Now she comes prancing on to the stage in a comic swimming suit, her face plastered with cosmetic mud.