The Princess shows never had any great stars; instead, they had the one quality which always makes for success—esprit de corps. In each the company was aware of the nature and quality of the piece it was playing, and it worked in variations of that genial and sophisticated atmosphere. It was simply against the tone of the Princess shows to be dull; and I, who like nearly all musical shows, found in them my greatest delight.
They passed into something else because they were exquisitely proportioned on a small scale—the scale, by the way of The Beggar’s Opera, which they resembled—and the whole tendency of the time was toward elaboration. They involved small choruses, little eccentric dancing, and required no humorist hors de texte. I count it a triumph for Mr Dillingham, as well as for the others concerned, that they have been able to preserve so much of the Princess in some of the Globe productions. The best of these, I think, is Good-morning, Dearie. It has an adequate plot; it has room for Harland Dixon, a fine dancer; for Ada Lewis, an expert broad comedienne; for Maurice and his partner, whose name I don’t remember; for a large dancing chorus and for stunts; better still it did little to hinder Jerome Kern. It was here that he took the most famous of waltzes and implicated it masterfully in a blues; and here that all the seductiveness and gaiety of the Princess music returned with Ka-lu-a and Didn’t You Believe? There were a few faults in the production; the décor lacked freshness, although it didn’t actually offend; the Chinese scene was hackneyed. But on the whole it is the best musical comedy I have seen since the Princess shows.
What forced us to be elaborate was not the memory of the Viennese type, but the growing complexity of revue, always cutting into musical comedy. It should be noted that Around the Map (which I hold the best musical comedy—not operetta—I saw before the Princess shows) first brought Joseph Urban into the field, taking him from the Boston Opera House and pushing him on the way to Ziegfeld, where he was tardily recognized by the Metropolitan for whom he has made Oberon! Around the Map had some twenty scenes, it dealt with a trip around the world in search of safety socks, and was all gay (with Else Alder), all good music (Caryll) and only the beginning of elaboration. But Mr Berlin’s two shows and a host of others indicated that to survive musical comedy would have to appear lavish. Comparatively simple shows still occur—Tangerine was one; but we seem to be in for something fairly elaborate—in music as in the Le-Baron-Kreisler pieces, in décor as in the Shubert-Century productions, in stars and stunts as in Dillingham’s.
I do not pretend to cover the ground, and to name the names, in this sketch; not even to characterize all the types. I don’t know what to say about Mary, in which George M. Cohan worked a chorus into a state of frantic energy and Louis Hirsch provided The Love Nest; nor of twenty other individual successes. One composer remains whose work is often so good, whose case is so illuminating, that he must be considered. That is Victor Herbert. It should be said at once that even long after his early successes he composed a fine musical comedy, The Only Girl. The difficulty about Mr Herbert is that he has succumbed to the American habit of thinking that grand opera is great opera. I have heard him at one of his premières speaking from the conductor’s dais to assure the audience that the present piece was in the high line of operetta, that more pieces like it would put an end to the vulgarity of musical shows. The regrettable fact was that The Madcap Duchess put an end to nothing but itself; I recall the name, that Ann Swinburne was in it, and that it had a good patter song; the rest was doleful. Whereas two weeks later in the same house I heard The Lady of the Slipper, in which Mr Herbert, setting out to write an ordinary simple musical show, was a thoroughly competent composer, full of ingenuity and interest and taste and invention. If he had only taken his eyes off the Metropolitan Opera House he would probably have been the best of the lot to-day. He suffers—although he is vastly respected—because he failed in respect to the fine art of the musical show.
The wonderful thing about that art is that it is made up of varied elements which are fused into something greater than themselves. There is a song and dance by Julia Sanderson, who is not a great artist; or the sudden apparition of a little man pursued in a harem, bounding upon a scarlet pouffe six feet in diameter and nuzzling like a dog—Jimmy Barton, in fact, who is one; and the rambling story told by Percival Knight in The Quaker Girl or the drunken scene by Clifton Crawford in The Peasant Girl; there is In the Night, from The Queen of the Movies or Johnny Dooley falling out of the clerk’s desk in Listen, Lester; there is Donald Brian, the perpetual jeune premier, or the amazing Spanish song in Apple Blossoms, or a setting designed by Norman-Bel Geddes or costumes by Helen Dryden or the Sandman song from The Dollar Princess, or the entrance of the Bulgarians in The Chocolate Soldier or the wickedly expert prosody of Brian Hooker. What is it takes all of these and composes them into something beautiful and entertaining? Skill in production is part of it, but not all, for the same elements: colour, light, sound, movement, can be combined into other forms which lack that particular air of urbanity, of well-being, of rich contentment and interest which is the special atmosphere of musical shows. I can only find a word and say that the secret resides in it—high spirits. For a musical comedy, even a sentimental one, must be high-spirited in execution—that was the lesson of an unsentimental one, The Beggar’s Opera; and at the same time there must be some courage, some defiance of nature and sound sense, a feeling for fantasy, which means that the life of the spirit is high, even when the life of the body is in chains. It is for this freedom of the spirit, released by music as always and diverted by all the other elements in them, that these shows are cherished. It is, naturally, as a counter-attack on solemnity that I am going to found my theatre.
The One-Man Show
THE ONE-MAN SHOW
When all the other grave æsthetic questions about the stage are answered, some profound theorist may explain the existence of the one-man show. Since I am not a materialist, I cannot concede the obvious solution—that a man finds enough money to produce himself in a Broadway show—because there is something attractive and mysterious about this type of entertainment which the explanation fails to explain.