Face the Music is a timely, satirical musicomedy which ordains itself to laugh and sing away the Depression. Scene I discloses a host of newly pauperized millionaires lunching gaily at the Automat, while a sightly chorus chants: See Mr. Whitney passing by, Putting mustard on a Swiss-on-Rye . . . There's Mrs. William Randolp Hearst, Saying, "That's my place I got there first!"
Written by Moss Hart and directed by George S. Kaufman, two genuinely funny men who collaborated on Once In A Lifetime, Face the Music's showmanlike libretto spares few phases of the contemporary metropolitan scene its breathless lampooning.
Times would indeed appear to be bad. You can see Ethel Barrymore, Professor Einstein and Tony the Wonder Horse at the Palace Theatre for 5¢, with a free lunch thrown in. Roxy's theatre is showing four feature films and giving away a room and bath for a dime. Another equally disastrous theatrical season, it is prophesied, and the show business will be back to the magic lantern. But there are people who still have plenty of money. They are Policeman Meshbesher (Hugh O'Connell) and those other fortunates who have been able to buy a seat on the force. It is Mrs. Meshbesher (Mary Boland) who declares that she has so many diamonds "you can see me from Yonkers." When Inquisitor Samuel Seabury (see p. 13) threatens the policemen with an investigation, they decide to conceal their opulence by financing a revue, The Rhinestones of 1932. High spot of this durbar, which must have cost Producer Sam H. Harris himself a good deal of money, is a lavish rhinestone Venetian scene, complete with half-a-dozen flights of rhinestone pigeons.
Face the Music slows up toward the end by the sheer weight of its extravagance in a courtroom scene in the Earl Carroll manner, but it would be a churlish critic indeed who would not admit that it is the most impressive musical show in town and one of the two funniest.
J. Harold Murray does most of the singing, assisted by taffy-haired Katherine Carrington, a lovely theatrical newcomer with a mouth like a D on its back. Irving Berlin (Israel Baline) appears to have reopened a few old scores for his music, but "A Roof in Manhattan" is memorably tuneful.
Lou Holtz Revue. That impertinent comedian Lou Holtz has assembled two hours of first-rate vaudeville. Continuity lies in the fact that Mr. Holtz introduces the numbers. His talent includes Clark & McCullough, Vincent Lopez's orchestra and a concluding scene which depicts Paul Revere's ride with a view of two lights shining from a miniature church steeple and a real horse galloping on a treadmill.
Collision. Olga (June Walker) pretends to be in love with a celebrated musician in order to spur the attentions of her real attachment, Dr. Gestzi (Geoffrey Kerr). Unhappily the musician is reported missing in a train wreck. So Olga feigns insanity, declares that Dr. Gestzi is her missing fiancé. Wise therapist, he humors her with a honeymoon, drugs her when she becomes unmaidenly and finally wakes up to the notion that he is in love with her himself.
Collision is adapted from the German by John Anderson, New York Journal theatre critic who revised The Fatal Alibi. His confreres did not fail to flay his present flimsy farce, observing that Critic Anderson would have done likewise.