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Trick For Trick. Azrah (James Rennie) and the Great La Tour (Henry O'Neill) were rival magicians. To solve a girl's murder, Azrah bets $1,000 that he can make her speak from the beyond, name her slayer. The Great La Tour bets he can not. There follows a great deal of lowering and upping of stage lights. During one dark spell the Great La Tour is killed. During another, on the first night, Critic Percy Hammond of the Herald Tribune disappeared. It was all right about the Great La Tour, however, because he turned out to have been a seducer of young girls.
If you enjoy seeing inkwells explode, crystals float off the stage and ectoplasmic bodies rise and wiggle upstairs, you will like Trick For Trick. It offers a happy combination of melodrama and the atmosphere of a Thurston matinée.
When The Bough Breaks. After an absence of more than eight years, Pauline Frederick has returned to the Broadway stage in an unflattering vehicle. On The Silver Cord theme, this play is aimed at the machinations of unwholesome maternal love. Miss Frederick is called upon, in her part as the selfish mother, to frustrate her son's opportunity for adventure in business, to blight his romance with the girl he loves and, ultimately, to lose his slavish unnatural devotion. Not one scrap of her miserably written play rings true.