There are, as Mr. Walker suggests, a great many things lacking in New York. The town would be the better for the planting of as many trees, proportionately, as, say, Cleveland or Rutland, Vermont. It could stand between five and ten thousand additional taxicabs, and its troublesome traffic problem could be solved within an hour by the flat abolition of all and any parking anywhere between the Battery and the Harlem River at any time. The all-night, mechanical ice delivery stations which are universal elsewhere would be a great help. The restoration of night steamboat service to Boston, Albany, Providence, the Virginia Capes, and elsewhere would be welcomed with dancing in the streets. The ridiculous business of the “Avenue of the Americas” might as well be liquidated now as later, and while they are about it they might restore so-called Times Square, which is actually and technically only the name of a subway station, to the pleasant name of Longacre Square.
There are these and many more minor improvements on the life scheme of Gothamtown, but hardly any of them are to be found as local institutions in Lampasas, Texas.
Running to form and character as the opening manifestations of a theater season almost universally admitted to be one in which revivals will dominate, the only two productions to have made their Broadway bows as this dispatch goes to the composing room have been, in fact, revivals. One of them, The Front Page, was frankly and in toto a revival of the text, at least, of the hilarious Chicago drama which delighted audiences in the twenties, while the other, Gypsy Lady, was a generally acceptable synthesis of two other Victor Herbert operettas whose structural economies made them in themselves impracticable of production and improbable of acceptance by contemporary audiences.
The third opening with pretensions to the attention of the public, Yours Is My Heart, was of such a melancholy character and so meanly endowed of recommendations at once by its production, its participants, and its entire atmosphere, that chivalry would suggest the omission of its mention and expediency would do the same on the basis of its improbable longevity.
The Front Page, while its production was nourished by the youthful enthusiasm of its producer, Hunt Stromberg, Jr., proved singularly lacking in the vitality and excitements which had made its original production two decades ago a near classic of the American stage. It suffered in the inevitable comparison to its great original and the film version which enhanced its primal luster, and it suffered by any more immediate and objective standards from a sort of anemia and malnutrition which made its every stance and gesture pallid and faltering. In a word, Mr. Stromberg, whom everyone along Broadway wishes well for a variety of personal and professional reasons, lacked inspiration in his casting and in the very considerable gusto of production which are both essential to this particular play. It is not enough that the players in the Hecht-MacArthur nonesuch should adhere faithfully to its raffish, uncouth, and hilarious text; they must lend it a verisimilitude of authenticity which transcends the mere speaking of sides. Perhaps a cast of genuine roughnecks rather than gentle and mannered mumpers recruited from the membership of the Players and the Lambs would be the solution. Certainly Lew Parker and Arnold Moss in the roles originally created by Lee Tracy and Osgood Perkins were a very gentle brace of newspapermen indeed, when both the script and tradition called for a determined hooliganism of approach and conduct. The best of the evening was unquestionably William Lynn's impersonation of Sheriff Hartman which was a lewdly hilarious combination of sniveler, rascal, and marplot. The Front Page rates about a C minus for its good intentions.
Brighter than the foregoing may be the report on Gypsy Lady, if only for the reason that the cast includes the incomparable Melville Cooper, a sly and malicious fellow whose accomplished drolleries have enlivened any number of musicals from Jubilee down to the present moment, and who has never yet failed any producer who employed him. As a sort of gypsy Mike Romanoff, his clowning is of a pattern with his wonderful Popoff in The Merry Widow and his Italian duke “with a legal, regal duchess” in a later musical version of The Firebrand.
The Romany shindig at the Century stands on Mr. Cooper and the Victor Herbert score, both of which do very well indeed as supports for a book that is no great shakes but is at least tastefully ornamented by a pleasing cast and furnished forth with modest opulence.
The New York theater season cannot, in all conscience, be reported to have opened with any resounding bang, but it may be forecast with some assurance that the next report in this department will be of a livelier nature. It should cover the openings of the American Repertory Theater's Henry VIII, the Guild's newest Eugene O'Neill threedecker, The Iceman Cometh, and Cecil Beaton's costumes for Lady Windermere's Fan, and the reporter is of good cheer about all of these.
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