In these various dramatic devisings the scenic designers have, of course, ha a field day since it is well known that to no generation is any period in history quite so evocative of delight, wonderment, and wistfulness as only yesterday. The playwrights themselves have not been too hard-put to it to call up well remembered emotions and the enchantment of a world where security, peace, and rational human expectations still obtained almost universally. In a word, theater-goers at the moment are pushovers for period-design plays, especially if the term of their remoteness doesn't place their setting out of the reach of first-hand experience or, at the most distance, that of a single generation ago. It is very easy for any imaginative person to place his own knowledge and experience within that of his immediate family.Are Victorianism and Edwardian atmosphere a trend in the theater? Very likely they are. All the signs of previous seasons, Life With Father and I Remember Mama among them, pointed to an inevitable deluge of similar plays or at least plays within an adjacent perio pattern. Now that it has been definitely ascertained that audiences will react with instant recognition and delight to Oldsmobiles, speaking tubes, Inverness cloaks, and references to the McKinley administration and woman's suffrage, it is only reasonable to suppose that these will appear in ever-increasing quantities until a state of audience satiety has been achieved. So far, that state has obviously not even been approximated. Next season should see an even bigger boom in sets representing the United States Hotel at Saratoga Springs, automobiling costumes including goggles and dust coats, and impersonations of Theodore Roosevelt. So far as this department is concerned, there can't be too many.
SHIRT-CUFF JOTTINGS: Gene Cavallero's Colony Restaurant is at the moment shy an excellent sommelier in the person of George Stich, who has opene more bottles in those classic premises than anyone likes to think about, but who has now taken over the “new” Salle du Bois Restaurant right around the corner in Sixtieth Street for his very own. …Ted Patrick's Holiday Magazine is scheduling an all-San Francisco issue in July with, almost inevitably, a full-dress piece on the Palace by this department. …Gene Fowler is working on a monumental life of Jimmy Walker for fall publication and is canvassing the mayor's old friends for material.…Last of the inveterate Inverness wearers is ex-Ambassador Joe Davies, who has ha half a dozen stormproof and evening cloaks run up in recent months by MacDonald-Heath, the Manhattan tailors to celebrities.…Customers at Romanoff's in Hollywood needn't be startled when the coat-check girl salutes them by name even if they aren't regulars: she's an importation from Sherman Billingsley's Stork on Fifty-third Street.…New York's Mayor O'Dwyer, happily enough and in contrast to the late LaGuardia, who had dyspepsia and hated food, is a considerable food fancier and dines regularly at the town's best restaurants: the Colony, Soulé's, and Voisin, and is reported by the staffs as knowing what's what very decidedly.…
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