The theory of the one-man show is apparently that there are individuals so endowed, so versatile, and so beloved, that no other vehicle will suffice to let them do their work. Conversely, that they are of such quality that they suffice for the strange entertainment with which they are surrounded and that nothing else matters provided they are long and frequent on the stage. Six men and two women are in the first roster of the one-man show: Fred Stone, Ed Wynn, Raymond Hitchcock, Eddie Cantor, Frank Tinney, and Al Jolson; below them, leading the women, Elsie Janis and Nora Bayes. And omitting Jolson because he is so great that he cannot be put in any company, the greatest one-man show was one in which none of these appeared—it was one in which even the man himself didn’t appear. It was a show in which one man succeeded where all of these, this time not excluding Jolson, had failed: for he made the whole production his kind of show—and the others have never quite managed to do more than make themselves.
The chief example of this failure is Hitchcock, whose series lapses ever so often, leaving him stranded on the bleak shore of a Pin Wheel Revue—an artistic, an intellectual, an incredibly stupid production which Hitchy manfully tried first to save and then to abandon. There were in the better Hitchy shows other first-rate people: one who masqueraded as Joseph Cook and was none other than Joe Cook the Humorist out of vaudeville and out of his element; Ray Dooley was with Hitchy, I believe, and there were always good dancers. Hitchy kept on the stage a long time, as conférencier and as participant, and his amiable drollery was always at the same level—just enough. He never quite concealed the strain of making a production go; one always wanted to be much more amused, and Hitchy never got beyond the episode of the Captain of the Fire Brigade or trying to buy the middle two-cent stamp in a sheet of a hundred. A series of vaudeville sketches doesn’t make a one-man show, even if he plays in all of them; and the moment Hitchcock was off, Hitchy-koo went to pieces, some good and some bad, and all trying a little too hard to be something else.
Eddie Cantor
By Roland Young
Eddie Cantor and Al Jolson appear in the two different Winter Garden types of show—the Jolson and the Winter Garden in impuris naturalibus. Jolson infuses something both gay and broad into his pieces; even the recurrence of Lawrence D’Orsay cannot win back the original Winter Garden atmosphere and even the disappearance of Kitty Doner cannot diminish Jolson’s private quality. Of the straight Winter Garden shows, the 1922 with Eddie Cantor was the best in ten years, made so by Cantor and made by him, in spite of the billing, into a one-man show. The nervous energy of Cantor isn’t sufficient to animate the active, but indifferent choruses of the Shuberts. One thing, however, he can do superbly—the lamb led to the slaughter. It is best when he chooses to play the timid, Ghetto-bred, pale-faced Jewish lad, seduced by glory or the prospects of pay into competing with athletes and bruisers. One thing he cannot do and should learn not to try—the black-face song and comedy of his master, Jolson. The scenes of violence vary; that of the osteopath was an exploitation of meaningless brutality; I cared for nothing after Eddie’s frightened entrance, “Are you the Ostermoor?” But the aviation examination and the application for the police force were excellent pieces of construction, holding sympathy all the way through and keeping on the safe side of nausea. Both of these were before the Winter Garden days and the Winter Garden exploit was better than either. He played here a cutter in a hand-me-down clothing store and it was his function to leap into the breach whenever a customer showed the slightest tendency to leave without buying a suit. The victim was obsessed by some idea of having “a belt in the back” and was forced into sailor suits and fancy costume and was generally made miserable. Eddie’s terrific rushes from the wings, his appeals to God to strike him dead “on the spot” if the suit now being tried on wasn’t the best suit in the world, his helplessness and his, “Well, kill me, so kill me,” as apology when his partner revealed the damning fact that that happened to be the man’s old suit—all of this was worth the whole of the Potash-Perlmutter cycle. And the whole-heartedness of Cantor’s violence—essentially the bullying of a coward who has at last discovered some one weaker than himself, was faultless. He sings well the slightly suggestive songs like After the Ball (new version), and his three broken dance steps with the sawing motion of his gloved hands create an image exceedingly precise and palpable. There is in him just enough for the one-man show, but so far it has been limited by his tendency to imitate and by failure to develop his own sources of strength. Even in Kid Boots he just fails to make the grade.
Frank Tinney
By Roland Young
The one-man show requires its leader to leave nothing in himself unexploited—there is too much for him to do and he must take everything on himself—the requirements are exactly opposite to those of the vaudeville act where the actor must work in the briefest compass, with the utmost concentration, and get his effects in the shortest time. Frank Tinney’s success in vaudeville marks the limitations of his success in his shows—for he imposed on vaudeville that languid easy-going manner of his and was just enough out of vaudeville tempo (he is very deceptive in this) to appear to be a novelty there. In essence he isn’t a good one-man, for his line is limited and his humour and his good-humour (in which he is matched only by Ed Wynn) are not capable of the strain of a long winter’s evening entertainment. Tinney was excellent in a quarrel scene with Bernard Granville (in a Ziegfeld Follies, I think) the two pacing in opposite directions, the width of the stage between them, always from footlights to backdrop and never crossing the stage; he was disputatious and entertaining on the negative of the proposition that the Erie railroad (pronounced for reasons of his own, Ee-righ) is a very expensive railroad; his appearance in Watch Your Step was almost perfect. (Consult Mr A. Woollcott’s Shouts and Murmurs for everything about Tinney; Mr Woollcott’s descriptions are accurate and evocative and he errs only in his estimate of Tinney’s quality.) Tinney has everything except the excess of vitality, the surcharge of genius. He has method nearly to perfection and it is a wholly original, ingratiating, and, up to a certain point, adaptable method. What he has done is to destroy the “good joke,” for all of Tinney’s jokes are bad ones and he gets his effect by fumbling about with them, by lengthening the preliminaries, by false starts, erasures, corrections—until his arrival at the point relieves the suspense. I have heard him take at least ten minutes to put over: “Lend me a dollar for a week, old man.—Who is the weak old man?” and not a moment was superfluous. He is expert at kidding the audience, and as he is never in character he never steps out. There isn’t quite enough of him, that is all.