A person can go to a limited number of shows each week, especially since there are but a limited number of evenings. This accounts for the delay in writing about some of last week’s openings on Broadway.
If you waste (I really don’t mean it) any time reading these columns you have been appraised of the worth of “Iolanthe,” “Jig Saw,” “The Lady From the Sea” and “Love Kills.” In addition there were two other openings, to wit-“Picnic” and a revival of “The Chocolate Soldier.”
PICNIC A THROWBACK
The play “Picnic,” which opened at the National, is the work of a serious young lady named Gretchen Damrosch. It was brilliantly conceived but emerges as a dull performance. Permeated with unreality and unbelievable characters, it fails to hold the interest of the audience.
As the title indicates, most of the action concerns a typical country picnic which a group of typical bourgeois people have planned. They are just plain folk, when into their midst marches Vera, a gal from the city who is all agog with a sense of injustice, a soap-boxer and agitator who can’t believe there is anything good in our way of living. She gets to work on the family, but at the picnic the woman in her breaks out in a flush, after a few kind words are thrown to her by a middle aged country gentleman. She quickly decides to desert her various causes and becomes the fiancee of this soft-spoken man of wealth.
Joanna Roos as the city gal of causes gives as good a performance as could be expected under the circumstances. Percy Waram and the rest of the cast are also burdened by the lines. “Picnic” is a distinct disappointment. Behind it lies a fine idea and it commences as though it were really going to have some meaning, but long before the piece has run its course the weakness of the script, the inadequacy of the situations and the colorlessness of the dialogue all combine to bore you.
THE CHOCOLATE SOLDIER
This operetta by Oscar Straus, based on Shaw’s play, “Arms and the Man,” which is being revived nightly at the St. James Theatre, suffers in comparison to the Gilbert and Sullivan cycle which is rolling on across the street. Not that it isn’t as well sung, directed or designed, but simply because the basic stuff is not there. Straus’s music is tuneful, but the lyrics are a far cry from the sprightly word juggling of Gilbert, and then it is all so dated and stale. Only those who are enamored of the piece will enjoy it. The young folks, I am afraid, will think their elders showed bad taste in raving about this relic of pre-war days. Bernice Claire, Fritz von Busing, Donald Brian and Charles Purcell were all in good voice and did ample justice to the songs our fathers used to hum.
NO GREATER GLORY
Columbia’s highly touted picturization of Franz Molnar’s novel, “The Paul Street Boys,” under the title of “No Greater Glory,” is playing at the Roxy Theatre this week. For reasons best known to the producers, it is being used as a means of propagating the antimilitaristic spirit. To me it will do just the converse. If anything it will make every youngster that sees it want to join a gang of boys. Nevertheless it is sensitively done, very well acted by a junior cast and finely directed. Although not exciting, it is a far better than the average Hollywood production.
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