The absolute legal minimum of liquor available in a cocktail anywhere should be three ounces, which, at current prices, would reduce the bar profit to a mere 400 or 500 per cent on every drink, and the hotel which can advertise that it hasn't a one-ounce jigger on the premises should get a civic award. There is no transaction in the world where the buyer should so much beware as when buying a drink over a bar, but the great American public, a sucker to its last dime and terrified to protest even when its pockets are being picked by unmasked criminals, puts up with the service of cocktails at six bits apiece, 50 per cent of which are as stimulating as so much tap water. There may be a good deal to be said, when all the returns are in, for the Texas or bottle-state civilization where the fool is protected from the ounce-and-a-half cocktail glass the way he is from morphine or blasting gelatin, by law, and where the least drink one can purchase is the reasonable or economy-size sixteen-ounce container.
Whatever other generalities may be derived from the evidence available at this writing as to the nature and quality of the current Broadway theater season, one circumstance permits of no debate at all. It is that the American legitimate stage is entirely and unequivocally in the hands of the English. Last year the two triumphant productions of the season were English plays acted by predominantly English casts, The Importance of Being Earnest and Lady Windermere's Fan. This year, so far at least, the single really triumphant offering has been English, played by an English cast: Maurice Evans' enchanting revival of Man and Superman at the Alvin. Its runner-up, The Heiress, which is an adaptation of Henry James's Washington Square, has for its principal performer an Englishman in the person of Basil Rathbone and for its author an expatriate American Anglophile who was more British in manner, person, and thinking than any beefeater you could imagine on duty at the Tower of London.
Whatever cumulative disasters may be encircling the British Commonwealth, deliberately pillaged and bankrupted by its “common man” government, the English theater still dominates the American stage and contrives this dominance with a charm, assurance, and grand manner that are irresistible.
According to the archivists, this is the first production of Man and Superman to have been staged on Broadway since 1912, and in reviving the manners, costumes, and other properties of that age, Mr. Evans very astutely played upon the sentiment of wistful nostalgia which is almost universal today and which is sure-fire theater, as can be attested by a long variety of successes ranging from I Remember Mama to High Button Shoes. It is entirely probable that the last years of English tranquility, which flowered so luxuriously and gracefully for a decade previous to the fateful date of 1914, may eventually find themselves one of the superlatively romantic and glamorous periods of the modern legend, with their American counterpart in San Francisco just before the fire of 1906 or Leadville and Denver in Haw Tabor times. They offer the same background of opulent period design, of individual characteristics, and brave gestures with doom, of a sort, in the now-known offing.
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