Mr. Evans has missed no single trick in recreating the London society of 1912 while cleaving to the strictest of Shavian intentions, and if some of the colloquies about money, Americans, and standards of sexual morality are so dated as to be practically sentimental souvenirs, there is nothing in the theater today which so fetches the cash customers as a Prince Albert coat or early Daimler motorcar with its occupants armed cap-a-pie against the elements in goggles, veils, and gauntlet gloves.
In much the same direction of effort, though, of course, in a widely separated field of endeavor, is the abovementioned High Button Shoes, a musical comedy with a book by the magnificent Stephen Longstreet, a notable in the list of GOURMET contributors, which is paying off at the Century Theater to audiences no less enthusiastic, in their fashion, that those of Man and Superman. High Button Shoes is strictly a period-design musical which relies for its bounce and uproar on such fairly assured devices as a Mack Sennett ballet and a Rutgers-Princeton football game in the era of Gloria Swanson and the original raccoon overcoat with the fur outside. GOURMET readers, familiar with Mr. Longstreet's wonderful whimsies and grand manner of yesterday, will recognize a wealth of his devices and allusions and, if they are in what even passes for their right minds, be enchanted with them.
The morning after the opening of High Button Shoes, this department encountered, handily encamped in the men's bar of the Plaza, which is something less than a seltzer squirt from the Century, a brace of important Wells Fargo Bank executives on safari from San Francisco. They had managed to extend their hotel accommodations, canceled their train space to Washington that afternoon, and indefinitely postponed all thought of returning to the valiant precincts of Market Street. For why? They were going that afternoon to the matinee of High Button Shoes, and to the evening performance and to the evening show the evening after that. They had seen it opening night and were not prepared to leave Manhattan until High Button Shoes went on the road, when they purposed to go with it. It seems, at the writing, as though this might be a long, but far from lonely, vigil.
The disappointment of the season, to date, has been a widely heralded and critically touted dreariness produced by the Guild under the title Allegro. So determined had been the Guild's advance promotion by word of mouth and other devices that a deplorable number of Manhattan's first-string reviewers were persuaded to lend their applause to a Rodgers-Hammerstein bore so far removed from, say, Oklahoma! as not to be recognizable as the product of the same team. The tiresome thing concerns itself with the biography of a smalltown doctor's son executed in Greek choral stances and stylized progressions with the usual ballet by Miss de Mille, a thing in itself excellent, but a manifestation which is coming to be standardized and on tap everywhere. As for the story of Allegro, who now cares?
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