Fast Life. Better had this piece been called Slow Death. It is another from fecund Playsmith Samuel Shipman. The male party to a companionate marriage is accused of murdering a friend. It turned out that the real murderer was the son of the Governor, but this development was not permitted to have any effect until the unjustly accused was seated in the electric chair, a hood over his head.
By Request. Bill Abbott (Elliott Nugent) is a tanktown newsman summering in Manhattan for business reasons. Claudia Wynn (Verree Teasdale), a blandishing literary agent, wants to cut capers with him at Bar Harbor. Just then Mrs. Abbott (Norma Lee) comes bringing her fetching naïveté from the plains and salvages her husband in two acts of dubious psychology. But if the psychology is brittle, Mr. Nugent's comic gaucherie is quite successful. He elicits considerable amusement despite a trite plot and an uneven script. Furthermore, Miss Teasdale is as lush a blonde as one is likely to see this early in the season. Father (J. C.) and son (Elliott) Nugent wrote the play. Father, son and son's wife (Norma Lee) all appeared in it.
Chee-Chee. Such is the babyish title of an Eastern and elaborate musical comedy whose plot depends, not upon romance and cotton-wool, but upon the hero's efforts to avoid castration. The hero is the son, born in early wedlock, of the Grand Eunuch. Not wishing to be his father's successor, he flees the royal city in company with his wife, Chee-Chee. On the road, they are beset by Tartars, monks and brigands who beat the hero and take Chee-Chee off-stage for purposes which can be guessed. Finally the Grand Eunuch catches up with his son and prepares to have him fitted for high office; but a friend of Chee-Chee, Li-Li-Wee, persuades her husband to kidnap and impersonate the surgeon. Li-Li-Wee's husband then plays dominoes with the son of the Grand Eunuch instead of operating on him; thus providing the most extraordinary happy-ending which has yet been permitted on the Manhattan stage.
It must be admitted that Chee-Chee, though sometimes cute and always dirty, is not consistently amusing. Herbert Fields deduced the book from Charles Petit's novel. Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart managed to engender "Better Be Good to Me" and "I Must Love You," but they were neither lyrically nor musically up to standards of their Garrick Gaieties or A Connecticut Yankee. Helen Ford as Chee-Chee and Betty Starbuck as Li-Li-Wee were respectively arch and charming. George Hassell squealed and grunted in cagey fashion as the Grand Eunuch. Chee-Chee would be funnier if it did not so faithfully preserve its "you're mine and I love you" attitude toward the slimy joke of compulsory castration. The critics were shocked, and the decent public, eager doubtless to see the sumptuous settings, crawled, in surreptitious droves, to see Chee-Chee.