It takes an Irishman and a Jew to make a good story and also to make a good vaudeville show and when vaudeville in a large way came back to Broadway via the Casino Theatre, the gent who booked the show saw to it that George Jessel and Walter O’Keefe headed the bill.
When the Palace bought sound equipment and began a grand policy of pictures and acts, vaudeville lost its last stronghold. The only chance left for the variety performer was to grab a radio contract or be willing to play four shows a day, five on Sundays, in a cinema palace, sandwiched between an emotional effusion from Hollywood and an animated cartoon. Vaudeville is trying a comeback.
AUSPICIOUS START
The show now playing twice daily at the renovated Casino Theatre on 50th street, started auspiciously. It is staged by Bobby Connolly. Vaudeville followers are in for a few hours of solid entertainment. In addition to the two talking and singing comedians, Gertrude Niesen, Antonio and Renee De Marco, Eunice Healey, Lucille Page, Pops and Louie, Raymond Covert, the Ritz Brothers and Bobby Connolly’s troupe of dancing girls round out a program that has everything. It is now up to the theatre-goers. If that fickle crowd will support vaudeville a lot of actors who have been standing around Times Square will eat this summer, otherwise it’s back to the laundry.
ONE MORE HONEYMOON
Last Saturday evening, it rained, if you remember, with the persistency of a collection agency after a sweepstake winner. During the downpour at the Little Theatre a new show opened quietly. It was called “One More Honeymoon” and dealt with a multitude of things but mostly with what happened to an ex-Yale man who, failing to make good in the exterminating business, marries an amorous widow and takes the lady for a honeymoon in Iceland which turns out to be far from cold; the honeymoon, not Iceland. There is little point in the play and it must be admitted that Saturday’s rain was still the more interesting event of the evening.
NEWS REEL, OTHER CINEMA NEWS
At the Embassy, Pathe News Theatre this week the second episode in “The World Cruise” is being shown. Each week you are taken by camera to various parts of the world. Last week we all visited Gibraltar and saw little of that spot but a great many British soldiers and this week we went to Monte Carlo, Mount Vesuvius, ancient Greece and ended up in Palestine… “Viva Villa” which Metro will bring into the Criterion Theatre next Tuesday evening is the story of the Mexican bandit and is said from advance reports to be one of the best pictures of the season. Wallace Berry plays the lead and the screen version was written by Ben Hecht. Another historical film is being made by Fox, who announce that Maximilian and Carlotta, the romantic tale of the adventure launched by Archduke Maximilian of Austria when that member of the royalty decided to form an empire in Mexico, is under way Ray Long and Frederick Collins wrote the story.
JTA has documented Jewish history in real-time for over a century. Keep our journalism strong by joining us in supporting independent, award-winning reporting.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
