The promise that Mr. Kellett Chalmers held out to us in his play of “Abigail,” with Miss Grace George, evaporated in a sad farce, or comedy, entitled “A Case of Frenzied Finance.” We had been flattering ourselves that we had discovered a new “outlook,” and we came a bad cropper. The simian antics of an impossible bell boy, in an impossible hotel, and his maneuvers in the arena of finance, were the “motive” of this extremely invertebrate contribution. There was an “Arizona Copper King”; there was his daughter; there was a gentleman from “Tombstone, Ariz.,” and there were some tourists drawn after the Clyde Fitch style, but with none of his lightness of touch.
It was almost impossible to follow the grotesque proceedings, and utterly impossible to find a gleam of interest in them. One of the characters drank incessantly through two acts, and indulged in the luxury of what is politely called a “jag.” We might have been pardoned for envying it. There are worse conditions, when it comes to the contemplation of such a “comedy” as “A Case of Frenzied Finance.” One suspected satire occasionally, but it was mere suspicion. One was anxious to suspect anything, but I always hold—and I may be wrong—that the best thing to look for, when one goes to the theater, is a play. Perhaps that is an old-fashioned notion.
This strange affair took us back to old times, when we were less sophisticated, but it is not at all likely that “A Case of Frenzied Finance” would have passed muster in the days when we approved and laughed at the works of the late Charles H. Hoyt. There was generally something salient in the Hoyt farces—some happy touch or some hit that “struck the nail on the head.” In the farce at the Savoy, there was much of the frenzy that is usually associated with the padded cell, and that is not, as a rule, enlivening to the outsider.
Mr. Douglas Fairbanks, a very “fresh” young actor, was the heroic bell boy, a very bad advertisement for New York hostelries. He worked harder than any bell boy has ever been known to do, and it seemed a shame to waste so much effort on alleged “drammer.” Mr. Fairbanks might possibly have made more of a lasting success in a real hotel than he will achieve in the spurious affair that was staged. A number of others, in an extremely uninteresting cast, labored ineffectively. Mr. Chalmers completely routed the good impression he had made in “Abigail,” and I should recommend him to “bide a wee” before hurling further manuscripts at susceptible managers—not for their sake, but for his own.
Mr. Paul Armstrong was luckier with “The Heir to the Hoorah.” How true it is that one can live down anything! It should be an inspiring and consolatory thought to Mr. Kellett Chalmers. Mr. Armstrong lived down “The Superstitions of Sue,” which, one might have thought, would have proved to be a veritable old-man-of-the-sea. This is, happily, a forgetful and unprejudiced public, and hope is rarely extinguished.
Although “The Heir to the Hoorah” was freighted with a title so prohibitive that people who attach importance to names might be excused for fighting shy of it, it proved to be a play with so many real laughs in it that criticism was disarmed—one always says that as though criticism started armed, which is absurd!—and joined in the somewhat irresistible mirth. It was a “Western” play, of course. “The Heir to the Hoorah” couldn’t be Eastern. But, by means of the West, Mr. Armstrong was able to get in some amusing episodes that appealed exclusively to the East. Much of it was devoted to parody of that sublime institution known as “evening dress”—popular on Third Avenue as the “dress suit.”
There is nothing really funnier. Of course we are accustomed to it. Our souls may rebel at its exigencies, but unless we happen to be millionaires, we cannot afford to flout the conventions. We wear the “evening dress” because we have been taught that it is respectable and seemly. In “The Heir to the Hoorah” a number of miners and “rough diamonds,” in “a mining town east of the Divide,” were portrayed in their struggles with civilization.
It was very droll. Dave Lacy, Bud Young, Mr. Kelly, Bill Ferguson, Lon Perry and Gus Ferris, all gorgeously uncouth, as far as externals go, made an admirable onslaught in the direction of the “dress suit.” “Immaculate evening dress,” as we call the garb of a man who is rigged up in imitation of the elusive but energetic restaurant waiter, has rarely been more humorously attacked. This feature went much further than did the story of the play. But it served to put an audience in such a good humor that the somewhat trivial play itself seemed better than it really was. Certainly no European playwright could have seen the ludicrous possibilities of evening dress as amusingly as Mr. Armstrong did. Perchance Mr. Bernard Shaw might have done so, but his cynicism would have marred the prospect. There was no “pose” in the humor at the Hudson Theater.
The play had the advantage of being well acted. We often complain that leading actors cannot wear evening dress gracefully. This time they had to do their worst for it, and were asked to wear it as ungracefully as they could. They were able to do it. Most of them were comparatively unknown, but they were none the worse for that. John Drew or William Faversham or Kyrle Bellew could not possibly have pilloried evening dress as did the actors in “The Heir to the Hoorah.”
“The Firm of Cunningham” succeeded “Mrs. Temple’s Telegram,” at the little Madison Square Theater, but did not prove to be a worthy successor. It was from the pen of Mr. Willis Steell, who rushed in where angels fear to tread; or, in other words, invented a couple of complex ladies, and then tried to explain them plausibly. There is no more difficult task. One lady was a skittish matron, addicted to betting on the races and to allowing a nice looking boy to kiss her; the other was a white-muslin girl from Vassar, who fell in love with that boy at remarkably short range.