John Murray Anderson’s is the hardest case to be sure about. A year ago he “struck a new note in revues”—by producing one without a scintilla of interest in any of its proceedings. Nothing quite so lackadaisical and dull has ever had such a success. Yet he had long before established a repute for being artistic—and, as far as I can judge, it was by the exploitation of millions of yards of draperies in place of the usual canvas scenery. It was a sound notion, and in the first of these productions, What’s in a Name? there was a pretty air of the semi-professional, a challenging suggestion of improvisation, as if the chorus and principals weren’t sure from moment to moment what the régisseur might suggest for them to do next.
He has always presented some of the loveliest and some of the ugliest costumes in New York; and now that draperies are no longer his only resource, he falls back upon transformations in scenery, or makes a painted backdrop of the Moonlight Sonata come to life, with music, to the astonishment of the multitude.
In short, it would appear that Mr Anderson is introducing into the revue precisely that element of artistic bunk which has long been the property of the bogus arts. I resent it, and resent it the more because he doesn’t need it. In his recent show there were elements beyond words to praise; the singing of Yvonne George was superb and superbly arranged; the Widow Brown song, sung and danced by Bert Savoy, had a quality of tenderness which all the sentimental songs in the Ziegfeld Follies try vainly to transmit; the two little tumblers, Fortunello and Cirillino, are by name and manner of the commedia dell’arte and John Hazzard’s song about Alaska, with slides by Walter Hoban, is the stuff that Forty-niners are made of.
It was in this show that the Herriman-Carpenter ballet of Krazy Kat was tried and dismissed, and the fault here is the fault of Mr Anderson throughout. Again it was attempted with an artistic dancer, when everyone who has intelligence of Krazy knows that it should be done by an American stunt dancer until the time when Mr Chaplin finds time to do it. Krazy Kat is exquisite and funny—and whether Mr Carpenter lets him remain so or not, it is clear that Mr Anderson wanted him to be artistic at all cost. So with his whole production; he has sacrificed fun all the way down the line; one is pleased, much more than amused, and the gigantic revelry, the broad levity of Bert Savoy stand apart from the show like a stranger. It is the one revue in which the mass dancing entirely fails to remain in the memory, and I am convinced that if Miss Brice hadn’t, in the Ziegfeld Follies, made Mon Homme a popular hit, Miss George’s far more fiery and varied and more generally interesting rendition of it would leave it cold in the ears of the audiences. For Mr Anderson has so far learned only to put over separate things, and until you put the whole thing over the individual things gain but half their victories.
That completes the circle to Mr Ziegfeld, and, since it is a question of putting it over, associates with him another man who on at least one occasion has done as well, Mr Charles Dillingham. If you omit the one man shows as practised by Ed Wynn, Frank Tinney and Al Jolson, and the nondescripts of Hitchcock, and pass over Stop! Look! Listen! as varying too far from the revue type, there remains Watch Your Step as another high spot in production, with the dancing of the Castles, the humours of that very great comedian, Harry Kelly, and of Tinney, the scenery and costumes by Robert McQuinn and Helen Dryden, and the whole story of contemporary dancing in Mr Berlin’s music. Except for Harry Kelly, every item was bettered in Stop! Look! Listen!, but in spite of the presence of Gaby Deslys, it was not a revue—whereas Watch Your Step almost consciously set out to proclaim itself superior in fineness and slickness to the Follies and almost succeeded.
I am trying to sketch the main types of revue, not to write a history of the revue; it is to be hoped that some one sufficiently sentimental can be found to do the job. Whether in a history the drunken scene of Leon Errol in the subway would figure largely, I do not know; I am not even sure that the scene in the Grand Central while it was building, with Bert Williams as the porter, would be noted; quite possibly the memory of Lillian Lorraine on the swings—to me merely a bearable necessity—and Frank Carter singing, (1918) I’m Going to Pin My Medal on the Girl I Left Behind, will seem more important than Ina Claire’s mimicry of Frances Starr’s Marie-Odile. It is possible that the injection of real humour, like Lardner’s, may make the set scenes like Laceland or the History of Shoes through the Ages or Our Colleges more and more dispensable. I do not know. I feel fairly certain only of this: that the relative importance of the workers in the field is measured by their mastery of the art of production far more than by their skill in picking individuals and stunts. I am also convinced that those who have arrived at this perfection in an effort to give America pleasure have done more for us than those who haven’t got half way in trying to give us art.