One young man—a journalist hanging on the ragged edge of decency, stated that he had some inside facts and intended to bring the whole thing out in a grand jury investigation. But he never got to the grand jury and the whole thing was suddenly hushed up. I leave it to you to imagine what happened.
It looks like a rotten year for the theatre business—and perhaps for other business.
At this writing there is not one legitimate show in New York doing any business. “Six Cylinder Love,” a comedy about a family which buys an automobile before they can really afford to do so, is supposed to be the one big hit of New York and it has already been forced to take blocks of its tickets over to the reduced rate ticket office to be sold at a discount.
Already, with the season hardly started, the beach is strewn with wrecks. One month, after the opening of the season, some nineteen shows had gone broke and had been taken off.
To be honest about it, I think most of the nineteen richly deserved it. For some unaccountable reason, nearly all the shows are infernally talky this year. The curtain goes up on a pair of people who gabble at you over the footlights until you have the blind staggers. When they—and you—are groggy, another pair take up the talk fest. Nothing ever happens but chatter. This is supposed to be the new “literal” and “realistic” school.
The high brow authors contend that their characters gabble over nothing for hours in real life; therefore, they should gabble by the hour about nothing in mimic life. By the same token I dare say they will show them putting hair lotion on their bald spots and trimming their corns and performing the other manifest, but not thrilling or interesting, duties of life.
If we are going to be realistic, b’gosh let’s be really so.
One of the few real successes of the theatre season is a coy and refined young comedy for the pure and young; it is called “Finding Gertie’s Garter.”
Al Woods, the promoter thereof, cheerfully admits all the rough things the papers and the preachers say about it. Al says that last year he listened to the critics who spurred him on to do his duty toward art and refinement. Result, he lost $75,000 on two high-brow plays. Hereafter, he is for bedroom farces “first, last and alla time” as politicians say.
Which brings us to Irving Berlin, the song writer who is just about to blossom out as a producer with a beautiful theatre of his own.