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Perhaps Betty Starbuck's most engaging action was the yodeling of "In a Great Big Way," one of the many merry anthems with which Jimmy McHugh decorated the score. Other such were "Let's Sit and Talk About You" and "I Want Plenty of You." Mary Lawlor was observed dancing well to these clever carols. A good quip (out of Manhattan Mary) was revived: "He's a wolf in cheap clothing."
The plot was preposterous. A respectable fellow with a simon-pure and scrawny wife, was pursued by a light lady. She asserted that he was the father of her son, a pimple-faced shoat who, whenever he saw his alleged progenitor, would grunt: "Hello, Daddy!"
Poppa is Poppa Schwitzky, a lazy Hebrew so much entangled in ward politics that he cannot see his way clear to working for a living. His daughter supports his family. When she becomes engaged to a man of wealth, Schwitzky looks around for an occupation. By good luck, he is made an alderman; by bad men, he is made to seem guilty of grafting; by good luck, he gets out of trouble. His son, Herbert, is a schlemiel (good-for-nothing).
Actress Anna Apple, as Mrs. Schwitzky, and Actor Jachial Goldsmith, her husband, are the two whose vernacular rattles most rapidly, almost rapidly enough to make the audience think that the play's humor is human rather than mechanical.
Brothers. Three meddling doctors, representing heredity, environment and kindly hocuspocus, agree to mold the destiny of slum-born twin brothers. They cause one brother to be adopted by a rich, impeccable family. This brother becomes a brilliant lawyer, but takes to dope and murder. The other brother is left in the slums; he becomes a piano-player in a speakeasy, but yearns for something better. As the play wobbles along, the doctors find it necessary to have the brothers change places. The piano-player "makes good" on Park Avenue; the dopey lawyer kills himself. There is also a love theme. Bert Lytell plays both brothers in a sotto voice, as if he were going to break into tears at any moment. Brothers is neither a serious play nor a melodrama.
Potiphar's Wife. The biblical Joseph was morally outraged when Potiphar's blunt wife said, "Lie with me." There was no outrage at all when Diana, Countess of Aylesbrough, jubilantly negligeed, spoke in the same wise to her chauffeur. He, no moralist till the third act, merely said that she did not attract him, kept liveried composure while she avenged the slight by rousing the household and charging him with attempted assault. In one more unlikely courtroom scene with the jury presumably in the first row of the audience, the chauffeur was exonerated, Lady Ayles-brough shamed. To end the play she, at home, telephoned an employment agency for a new chauffeur.
This dull play achieved two distinctions. It had a curtain line first written by Oscar Wilde, and it opened Manhattan's latest theatre, the Craig, which is within speaking distance of elevated railways and trolleys on Seventh Avenue. '