(Courtesy of A. and C. Boni)
George M. Cohan. By Alfred Frueh
The annihilation of all the vast and silly posturing which went on a few years ago under the name of The Jest was accomplished in a perfect burlesque by Blanche Ring and Charles Winninger (the latter played Leo Ditrichstein in one of the Cohan revues) and if The Sheik never reached the stage it is possibly because Eddie Cantor burlesqued it in advance on a bicycle and with a time clock for the women of the harem. What has held the Winter Garden down (except, of course, when Al Jolson there inhabited) is the lack of good music; for the humour has always been broad and the slap-stick merry. The shows there always seem to be hankering a little for the additional vulgarity of out-and-out burlesque, but the Rath Brothers were as much at home there as the Avon Comedy Four; if my head were at stake I could not recall a single thing there which could be called exquisite, but I swear that as the show girls shuffled precariously up and down the runway I did at times fancy I heard the stamping of a goatish foot behind the scenes, and if I didn’t like the sound, I was in the minority. The Winter Garden has always been, in part, a direct assault on the senses and the method of art is always indirect; Mr Ziegfeld knows this and always manages to bathe his scenes in a cool virginal light, to the intensification of pleasure for the connoisseurs.
The difference between these two shows can be measured by watching one figure pass across the stage of each. Last year at the Winter Garden Conchita Piquer sang a malagueña. (You can discover all you need to know about the malagueña in Mr Santayana’s Soliloquies; to us it is the perfect exotic, as strange to our ears as Chinese song—stranger because it remains recognizably Occidental, yet seems to be based on no intervals known to our scales, and its rhythm is capricious and uncertain). She sang it “wildly well,” with a pert assured air of superiority. Yet she cast flowers into the audience as she did so, and the background and the massing of the chorus behind her were all out of key and prevented the song from being what at the Ziegfeld Follies it inevitably must have been, exquisite.
At the Follies passes Gilda Grey, a performer of limited talents gifted with unutterable intensity. Against a flaring background in which all the signs of all of Broadway are crowded together, she sings a commentary on the negro invasion—It’s Getting Very Dark on Old Broadway—the scene fades and radiolite picks out the white dresses of the chorus, the hands and faces recede into undistinguishable black. And while the chorus sings Miss Grey’s voice rises in a deep and shuddering ecstasy to cry out the two words, “Getting darker!” To disengage that cry, to insure its repercussion, went all the skill of production in everything that preceded and in everything that followed. It was exciting, but it was also exquisite, and that is exactly what the Winter Garden could not have done.
Neither of the two Music Box revues has reached that height, because in neither has production kept pace with Berlin’s music. It is part of the technique of the revue to have “stunts” and Berlin, being capable du tout, last year set a dining menu to music. Yet nothing was added when lobster and mayonnaise and celery appeared in the flesh; even worse, this year something precious is lost when one of Berlin’s veritable masterpieces, Pack Up Your Sins and Go to the Devil, is produced with an endless number of trapdoors and hoists and all the other mechanics of the stage. The first of the two revues flourished on humour—Willie Collier and Sam Bernard were inexpressibly funny—and on Berlin’s Say It With Music; so long as it stayed in New York the appearance in person of Mr Berlin, explaining to the well-remembered tunes how he wrote each of his masterpieces of ragtime, added much.
The tone of this revue was the tone of the building itself—varying from the cool and well-proportioned exterior to the comfortable, a little lavish interior. Florence Moore was as outrageous as ever, and at least as active; she is the most tireless person on the stage and to me the most tiring, for her vitality affects me as a cyclone in which I am quite unnecessarily involved. All the more surprising, then, was her shift from horseplay to burlesque in the house-hunting scene with Sam Bernard, at the end of which the children were shot by their despairing parents to remove the one obstacle between them and the perfect apartment. In an earlier scene Collier had had his chance—the one in which Bernard tried to explain his difficulties and to read a letter. All of Bernard’s stutterings and flounderings in the English vocabulary availed nothing against Collier’s imperturbable indifference. Collier has always had a divine spark—it was visible even in The Hottentot—and in that scene it glowed beautifully. The show was, to be sure, held in the matrix of Berlin’s score, and was as much held down as up to that level—I mean it was not spoiled by the intrusion of alien theatrical elements. Since then a new hydraulic system has apparently been added to the equipment of the stage, and Hassard Short, confusing the dynamics of the theatre with mere hoisting power, moves everything that can be moved except the audience. The elements are all there, but they are produced as if it were a benefit, not a revue.
(Courtesy of A. and C. Boni)
Willie Collier. By Alfred Frueh