The Dial (Third Series)/Volume 75/The Theatre (August 1923)
THE THEATRE
AMONG the summer shows, so far as I have seen them, the Follies is the most satisfactory. Aren't We All? is an amusing enough little English comedy which would be more amusing if it were less good-natured. The Winter Garden has some good comedians, but very few funny ideas. Helen of Troy, New York, a musical comedy by Connelly and Kaufman, is only mildly amusing in itself. The authors have tried to transplant to musical comedy the business satire of To the Ladies, but in rather an indifferent and perfunctory fashion; and they have eked out their satiric material with all the clichés of the machine-made show. These devices, which carry Sally to triumph, leave Messrs Connelly and Kaufman flat. They have reckoned without the great principle—amply illustrated by Helen of Troy—that the stupid jokes of clever people can never hope to be so successful as the stupid jokes of stupid people. Clever people have a way of spoiling banality by betraying that they do not believe in it. They engage in it without spirit and their lack of enthusiasm usually shows. Right against a gag aimed at the boobs they will write a sarcasm intended for the intelligent, with the result that the latter are left unsatisfied while the fun has been spoiled for the former. I believe that the authors of Helen of Troy would have been more successful in having the complete courage of their convictions than in at- tempting to guarantee themselves against failure by dragging in all the old tricks.
The real vitality of Helen of Troy is supplied by Miss Queenie Smith, who brings delicacy as well as verve to the rôle of the comic second woman. A former member of the Metropolitan ballet, she has learned a singular deftness of pantomime, and a genuine aesthetic instinct to which she subordinates all she does. Her burlesque Pavlowa ballet is the best I have ever seen—better even than Fannie Brice's or James Watts'—because it is graceful as well as funny. She has a gift for swift changes of mood—rather perhaps when she is dancing than when she is acting—which in its sureness and its distinction even recalls a little Yvette Guilbert. Light and shadow, awkwardness and grace flutter her tiny figure like a breeze. One wonders if she will not be able to develop material which will enable her to appear to even better advantage.
The "new edition" of the Ziegfeld Follies is a considerable improvement on the old—in fact it is one of the very best Follies I remember. The new acts which have been substituted are not only, in general, more interesting than the old, but they also fit better in the Follies: in almost every case, you have a high pressure act substituted for a vague or slowly moving one. Instead of Ring Lardner's rather casual Rip Van Winkle sketch you have a terrific team of rube dancers, and for the halting drawl of Will Rogers you have the machine-like energy of Eddie Cantor. Furthermore, Ann Pennington has been added, so that, with Cantor and Gilda Gray, you have perhaps the three highest pressure performers in the city all under the same canvas. The tempo of the show is now uniform and it is the same as that of the life outside. It is New York in terms of entertainment—the expression of extreme nervous intensity to the tune of harsh complicated harmonies. When you take the subway after the theatre, it speeds you straight with a crash to your goal, like a song by Eddie Cantor; and in the roar of the nocturnal city, driven rhythmically for all its confusion, you catch hoarse echoes of Gilda Gray singing her incomparable Come Along!
One instrument in the great jazz band of New York has suddenly been silenced: Bert Savoy is dead. But the comic character he created will never be forgotten by those who saw it. When he used to come reeling on to the stage, a gigantic red-haired harlot, swaying her enormous hat, reeking with the corrosive cocktails of the West Fifties, one felt oneself in the presence of the vast vulgarity of New York incarnate and made heroic. Well, we have heard the last of Margy's wise-cracks and the thought is a genuinely sad one. Still, in the brash nights of the city, between Reisenweber's and the Montmartre, we shall sometimes be haunted by the accents of a gasping raucous voice, hard-boiled, shamefully obscene, but in a continual tremor of female excitement: "I'm so glad you asked me that, dearie! You don't know the half of it, dearie! You don't know the half of it, dearie!"