Chapter V: Part 5

The rare entertainment such a theatre will afford can be guessed if you look for a moment at the changes in musical shows since 1900. We were then coming out of the Gilbert and Sullivan tradition and (after a great vogue of extravaganza) coming into the Viennese mode. It is the fashion now, especially in France, to belittle the Viennese operetta, to call its waltz song heavy and its structure a bore. Possibly these things are true; but Vienna has been the home of operetta for over a century and has done well by itself most of the time. Illumination of this predominant influence you can get by going to the Redoutensaal and hearing a performance of _The Marriage of Figaro_, and within the next few days hearing _Die Fledermaus_ and whatever new piece Lehar or Fall or Oscar Straus has composed. For what one seldom knows from its loftier production is that _Figaro_ is in essence and detail a musical comedy and that almost all we know of the form stems from the combination effected there by a great composer, a fine dramatist, and an exceptionally skilful librettist.[14] The imperial ballroom with its tapestried walls, its small stage on which only conventionalized scenery can be set, its divided stairway coming down on the stage, is a setting admirably contrived to give the whole loveliness of operetta. The last scene is in the garden of the count: six boxed trees and moonlight create the effect. And at the last moment, the happy ending, the electric lights are thrown on, the vast crystal chandelier lighting up over the garden, and the event recedes into its real, its secondary framework, as entertainment. One recognizes it for what it is--the gay and exquisite counterpart of grand opera, from which neither the Savoy nor the Viennese operetta ever departed. Musically the Viennese type corresponds more clearly to Italian, the Gilbert and Sullivan to French opera. The absurd conventions of production are taken bodily from the older and more respected type. The same thing is as obviously true in Cimarosa’s _Marriage Secret_ as it is in _The Chocolate Soldier_--the latter being, except for a weaker libretto, a perfect parallel to _Figaro_. (And nearly as worthy of the perpetual life which is apparently to be denied it.)

It is still unnecessary to describe the Viennese operetta in detail, for immediately after the war it came again into vogue and one or two excellent examples--_The Last Waltz_ was one of them--re-established some of its ancient prestige. It is at bottom produced _for the music_. In one the music may be chiefly sung, in another danced. Everything else--_décor_, story, humorous episodes--is secondary. Recently an effort has been made to change this. Oscar Straus’ _Törichte Jungfrau_ at the Grossesschauspielhaus (Reinhardt’s catacombs in Berlin) was all production--and nearly all dreadful. Lehar’s latest, _Das Gelbe Jacke_ (not, however, our _Yellow Jacket_) is entirely in the pure Viennese mode, and the Vienna production (February, 1923) indicates how Viennese operetta is improved in transit to our shores. For our production of musical comedy is almost equal to our production of revue, which is incontestably the finest in the world. With their emphasis on music the Viennese shows naturally centre about the famous waltz-song; and one good waltz has been able to make a show a success. Rudolf Friml made a success of _High Jinks_ with a fox-trot.

The English type as we know it, including Caryll and Monckton and Rubens, has had for thirty years the Savoy tradition. This requires a plot of more frivolity than the Viennese, and lyrics of greater humour. The successes have been moderate--“I’ve got a motto” is no masterpiece. The degree of fun has been higher and the seductiveness of the music less. It was perfectly natural that (with _Adele_ to help them on) a combination of virtues should take place in America in the beautiful _Princess Shows_ of Comstock and Gest, where the talents of P. G. Wodehouse, Guy Bolton, and Jerome Kern, stage-managed perfectly by Robert Milton, produced a fresh and attractive type of musical show which for five years progressed in popularity--but had few imitators--and suddenly seemed to disappear. It was, in fact, transformed into something else, something good. But one should look at the original closely to discern its exceptional virtues.

Each of the Princess shows had a reasonable, but not serious, plot. The advantage of a plot isn’t, as one often hears, that it gives the appearance of reality to the piece, for who should expect that? There is no reason why a musical comedy should not be wholly preposterous, dramatically or psychologically, provided, like _Iolanthe_, it has a logic of its own. No. The advantage is that when there is a definitely perceptible structure everything else arrives with greater intensity of effect. The best of the Princess shows had the weakest plot, for _Leave It to Jane_ was based on Ade’s _College Widow_, which has no great quality. Since songs and dances had to take up much time, this plot was gratifyingly reduced to a few essential lines and played without sentiment. The result was a rush of action in which everything found place. The later pieces were on librettos by Guy Bolton, suggesting French farces, and full of neat arrangements. None of them was stupid. They all gave place for Mr Wodehouse’s exceptional talents as a lyric-writer. He is as an English humorist superior to most, and as a master of complicated, original, amusing rhymes is the best man in the business. A special quality of making fun is discernible in all his lyrics, and he does good parodies, like _When It’s Nesting Time in Flatbush_. The Princess type made rather a fetish of simplicity (I quote from memory):

Although the thing that’s smart is
To stay out all night on parties,
I’ll be sitting, with my knitting,
In the good old-fashioned way,

and of sentiment:

The breeze in the trees brings a scent of orange blossoms
And the skies turn soft and blue,
When there’s no one around except the girl you love
And the girl you love loves you,

which was often not amorous and rose to as fine a thing as _The Siren Song_:

Come to us, we’ve waited so long for you,
Every day we make a new song for you;
Come, come, to us, we love you so.
Leave behind the world and its fretting
And we will give you rest and forgetting,
So sang the sirens ages and ages ago.

There was also patter as in the Cleopatra song:

And when she tired, as girls will do,
Of Bill or Jack or Jim,
The time had come, his friends all knew,
To say good-by to him.
She would not stand by any means
Regretful, stormy, farewell scenes,
To such low stuff she would not stoop
So she just put poison in the soup.

When out with Cleopatterer
Men always made their wills;
They knew they had no time to waste.
When the gumbo had that funny taste
They’d take her hand and squeeze it
And murmur, “Oh, you kid!”
But they none of ’em liked to start to feed
Till Cleopatterer did.

and in each of these types Wodehouse was faultless.

Fortunately for him and for us these songs were set to a music which in addition to being delightful let the words appear, and occasionally was so fluent, so inevitable, that it made the words seem even simpler and more conversational than they are. Jerome Kern composed nearly all of the Princess shows and the collected scores are impressive. He is the most erudite of our simple composers and he manipulates material with inordinate skill. He can adapt German folksong (_Freut euch das Leben_ underlies _Phoebe Snow_); he didn’t do so well by _Kingdom Comin’_, which was botched and cut; he also understands Sullivan. But his best work, _The Siren Song_, _The Little Ships_, _The Sun Shines Brighter_, have a melodious line, a structure, and a general tidiness of execution which are all their own. _The Siren Song_ corresponds exactly to the Viennese waltz, but both the words and the music are impersonal; they are a gentle hymn to seduction, with humour. Scattered between languorous rhythms are bursts of gaiety, like a handful of pebbles thrown against a window--which doesn’t open--for the song ends in a tender melancholy. It is a real achievement. Compare the lines I have quoted above with “Come, come, I love you only,” from _The Chocolate Soldier_--phrases you would expect to arrive at the same musical conclusion. The crash of “_Oh, Hero Mine!_” in the second is good drama, saved from being too obvious by being sung to the coward Sergius and not to the protagonist Bluntschli. But in comparison the gentle ending of _The Siren Song_ is, as song, superior: “So sang the Sirens, ages and ages ago”--and you take it or leave it. The music, at least, is not forcing your hand.

The Princess shows never had any great stars; instead, they had the one quality which always makes for success--_esprit de corps_. In each the company was aware of the nature and quality of the piece it was playing, and it worked in variations of that genial and sophisticated atmosphere. It was simply against the tone of the Princess shows to be dull; and I, who like nearly all musical shows, found in them my greatest delight.

They passed into something else because they were exquisitely proportioned on a small scale--the scale, by the way of _The Beggar’s Opera_, which they resembled--and the whole tendency of the time was toward elaboration. They involved small choruses, little eccentric dancing, and required no humorist _hors de texte_. I count it a triumph for Mr Dillingham, as well as for the others concerned, that they have been able to preserve so much of the Princess in some of the Globe productions. The best of these, I think, is _Good-morning, Dearie_. It has an adequate plot; it has room for Harland Dixon, a fine dancer; for Ada Lewis, an expert broad comedienne; for Maurice and his partner, whose name I don’t remember; for a large dancing chorus and for stunts; better still it did little to hinder Jerome Kern. It was here that he took the most famous of waltzes and implicated it masterfully in a blues; and here that all the seductiveness and gaiety of the Princess music returned with _Ka-lu-a_ and _Didn’t You Believe?_ There were a few faults in the production; the _décor_ lacked freshness, although it didn’t actually offend; the Chinese scene was hackneyed. But on the whole it is the best musical comedy I have seen since the Princess shows.

What forced us to be elaborate was not the memory of the Viennese type, but the growing complexity of revue, always cutting into musical comedy. It should be noted that _Around the Map_ (which I hold the best musical comedy--not operetta--I saw before the Princess shows) first brought Joseph Urban into the field, taking him from the Boston Opera House and pushing him on the way to Ziegfeld, where he was tardily recognized by the Metropolitan for whom he has made _Oberon!_ _Around the Map_ had some twenty scenes, it dealt with a trip around the world in search of safety socks, and was all gay (with Else Alder), all good music (Caryll) and only the beginning of elaboration. But Mr Berlin’s two shows and a host of others indicated that to survive musical comedy would have to appear lavish. Comparatively simple shows still occur--_Tangerine_ was one; but we seem to be in for something fairly elaborate--in music as in the Le-Baron-Kreisler pieces, in _décor_ as in the Shubert-Century productions, in stars and stunts as in Dillingham’s.

I do not pretend to cover the ground, and to name the names, in this sketch; not even to characterize all the types. I don’t know what to say about _Mary_, in which George M. Cohan worked a chorus into a state of frantic energy and Louis Hirsch provided _The Love Nest;_ nor of twenty other individual successes. One composer remains whose work is often so good, whose case is so illuminating, that he must be considered. That is Victor Herbert. It should be said at once that even long after his early successes he composed a fine musical comedy, _The Only Girl_. The difficulty about Mr Herbert is that he has succumbed to the American habit of thinking that grand opera is great opera. I have heard him at one of his _premières_ speaking from the conductor’s dais to assure the audience that the present piece was in the high line of operetta, that more pieces like it would put an end to the vulgarity of musical shows. The regrettable fact was that _The Madcap Duchess_ put an end to nothing but itself; I recall the name, that Ann Swinburne was in it, and that it had a good patter song; the rest was doleful. Whereas two weeks later in the same house I heard _The Lady of the Slipper_, in which Mr Herbert, setting out to write an ordinary simple musical show, was a thoroughly competent composer, full of ingenuity and interest and taste and invention. If he had only taken his eyes off the Metropolitan Opera House he would probably have been the best of the lot to-day. He suffers--although he is vastly respected--because he failed in respect to the fine art of the musical show.

The wonderful thing about that art is that it is made up of varied elements which are fused into something greater than themselves. There is a song and dance by Julia Sanderson, who is not a great artist; or the sudden apparition of a little man pursued in a harem, bounding upon a scarlet pouffe six feet in diameter and nuzzling like a dog--Jimmy Barton, in fact, who is one; and the rambling story told by Percival Knight in _The Quaker Girl_ or the drunken scene by Clifton Crawford in _The Peasant Girl_; there is _In the Night_, from _The Queen of the Movies_ or Johnny Dooley falling out of the clerk’s desk in _Listen, Lester_; there is Donald Brian, the perpetual _jeune premier_, or the amazing Spanish song in _Apple Blossoms_, or a setting designed by Norman-Bel Geddes or costumes by Helen Dryden or the _Sandman_ song from _The Dollar Princess_, or the entrance of the Bulgarians in _The Chocolate Soldier_ or the wickedly expert prosody of Brian Hooker. What is it takes all of these and composes them into something beautiful and entertaining? Skill in production is part of it, but not all, for the same elements: colour, light, sound, movement, can be combined into other forms which lack that particular air of urbanity, of well-being, of rich contentment and interest which is the special atmosphere of musical shows. I can only find a word and say that the secret resides in it--high spirits. For a musical comedy, even a sentimental one, must be high-spirited in execution--that was the lesson of an unsentimental one, _The Beggar’s Opera_; and at the same time there must be some courage, some defiance of nature and sound sense, a feeling for fantasy, which means that the life of the spirit is high, even when the life of the body is in chains. It is for this freedom of the spirit, released by music as always and diverted by all the other elements in them, that these shows are cherished. It is, naturally, as a counter-attack on solemnity that I am going to found my theatre.

_The One-Man Show_

THE ONE-MAN SHOW

When all the other grave æsthetic questions about the stage are answered, some profound theorist may explain the existence of the one-man show. Since I am not a materialist, I cannot concede the obvious solution--that a man finds enough money to produce himself in a Broadway show--because there is something attractive and mysterious about this type of entertainment which the explanation fails to explain.

The theory of the one-man show is apparently that there are individuals so endowed, so versatile, and so beloved, that no other vehicle will suffice to let them do their work. Conversely, that they are of such quality that _they_ suffice for the strange entertainment with which they are surrounded and that nothing else matters provided they are long and frequent on the stage. Six men and two women are in the first roster of the one-man show: Fred Stone, Ed Wynn, Raymond Hitchcock, Eddie Cantor, Frank Tinney, and Al Jolson; below them, leading the women, Elsie Janis and Nora Bayes. And omitting Jolson because he is so great that he cannot be put in any company, the greatest one-man show was one in which none of these appeared--it was one in which even the man himself didn’t appear. It was a show in which one man succeeded where all of these, this time not excluding Jolson, had failed: for he made the whole production _his kind_ of show--and the others have never quite managed to do more than make themselves.

The chief example of this failure is Hitchcock, whose series lapses ever so often, leaving him stranded on the bleak shore of a _Pin Wheel Revue_--an artistic, an intellectual, an incredibly stupid production which Hitchy manfully tried first to save and then to abandon. There were in the better Hitchy shows other first-rate people: one who masqueraded as Joseph Cook and was none other than Joe Cook the Humorist out of vaudeville and out of his element; Ray Dooley was with Hitchy, I believe, and there were always good dancers. Hitchy kept on the stage a long time, as _conférencier_ and as participant, and his amiable drollery was always at the same level--just enough. He never quite concealed the strain of making a production _go_; one always wanted to be much more amused, and Hitchy never got beyond the episode of the Captain of the Fire Brigade or trying to buy the middle two-cent stamp in a sheet of a hundred. A series of vaudeville sketches doesn’t make a one-man show, even if he plays in all of them; and the moment Hitchcock was off, _Hitchy-koo_ went to pieces, some good and some bad, and all trying a little too hard to be something else.

By Roland Young]

Eddie Cantor and Al Jolson appear in the two different Winter Garden types of show--the Jolson and the Winter Garden _in impuris naturalibus_. Jolson infuses something both gay and broad into his pieces; even the recurrence of Lawrence D’Orsay cannot win back the original Winter Garden atmosphere and even the disappearance of Kitty Doner cannot diminish Jolson’s private quality. Of the straight Winter Garden shows, the 1922 with Eddie Cantor was the best in ten years, made so by Cantor and made by him, in spite of the billing, into a one-man show. The nervous energy of Cantor isn’t sufficient to animate the active, but indifferent choruses of the Shuberts. One thing, however, he can do superbly--the lamb led to the slaughter. It is best when he chooses to play the timid, Ghetto-bred, pale-faced Jewish lad, seduced by glory or the prospects of pay into competing with athletes and bruisers. One thing he cannot do and should learn not to try--the black-face song and comedy of his master, Jolson. The scenes of violence vary; that of the osteopath was an exploitation of meaningless brutality; I cared for nothing after Eddie’s frightened entrance, “Are you the Ostermoor?” But the aviation examination and the application for the police force were excellent pieces of construction, holding sympathy all the way through and keeping on the safe side of nausea. Both of these were before the Winter Garden days and the Winter Garden exploit was better than either. He played here a cutter in a hand-me-down clothing store and it was his function to leap into the breach whenever a customer showed the slightest tendency to leave without buying a suit. The victim was obsessed by some idea of having “a belt in the back” and was forced into sailor suits and fancy costume and was generally made miserable. Eddie’s terrific rushes from the wings, his appeals to God to strike him dead “on the spot” if the suit now being tried on wasn’t the best suit in the world, his helplessness and his, “Well, kill me, so kill me,” as apology when his partner revealed the damning fact that that happened to be the man’s old suit--all of this was worth the whole of the Potash-Perlmutter cycle. And the whole-heartedness of Cantor’s violence--essentially the bullying of a coward who has at last discovered some one weaker than himself, was faultless. He sings well the slightly suggestive songs like _After the Ball_ (new version), and his three broken dance steps with the sawing motion of his gloved hands create an image exceedingly precise and palpable. There is in him just enough for the one-man show, but so far it has been limited by his tendency to imitate and by failure to develop his own sources of strength. Even in _Kid Boots_ he just fails to make the grade.

By Roland Young]

The one-man show _requires_ its leader to leave nothing in himself unexploited--there is too much for him to do and he must take everything on himself--the requirements are exactly opposite to those of the vaudeville act where the actor must work in the briefest compass, with the utmost concentration, and get his effects in the shortest time. Frank Tinney’s success in vaudeville marks the limitations of his success in his shows--for he imposed on vaudeville that languid easy-going manner of his and was just enough out of vaudeville tempo (he is very deceptive in this) to appear to be a novelty there. In essence he isn’t a good one-man, for his line is limited and his humour and his good-humour (in which he is matched only by Ed Wynn) are not capable of the strain of a long winter’s evening entertainment. Tinney was excellent in a quarrel scene with Bernard Granville (in a Ziegfeld _Follies_, I think) the two pacing in opposite directions, the width of the stage between them, always from footlights to backdrop and never crossing the stage; he was disputatious and entertaining on the negative of the proposition that the Erie railroad (pronounced for reasons of his own, Ee-righ) is a very expensive railroad; his appearance in _Watch Your Step_ was almost perfect. (Consult Mr A. Woollcott’s _Shouts and Murmurs_ for everything about Tinney; Mr Woollcott’s descriptions are accurate and evocative and he errs only in his estimate of Tinney’s quality.) Tinney has everything except the excess of vitality, the surcharge of genius. He has method nearly to perfection and it is a wholly original, ingratiating, and, up to a certain point, adaptable method. What he has done is to destroy the “good joke,” for all of Tinney’s jokes are bad ones and he gets his effect by fumbling about with them, by lengthening the preliminaries, by false starts, erasures, corrections--until his arrival at the point relieves the suspense. I have heard him take at least ten minutes to put over: “Lend me a dollar for a week, old man.--Who is the weak old man?” and not a moment was superfluous. He is expert at kidding the audience, and as he is never in character he never steps out. There isn’t quite enough of him, that is all.

There is enough of Fred Stone for versatility and not enough for specific personal appeal. As acrobat, dancer, ventriloquist, and cut-up Stone is easily in the lead; but the unnamable quality is lacking. See him climbing up an arbour to meet his Juliet in the balcony; he is discovered, hangs head downward in peril of his life, seizes a potted flower and with it begins to dust the vines--it is Chaplinesque in conception and beautifully executed. See him on the slack rope continually on the point of falling off and continually recovering and seeming to hang on by his boot toe; or in _The Lady of the Slipper_ making a beautiful series of leaps from chair to divan, from divan to table, to a triumphant exit through the unsuspected scenery; or in another quality recall the famous “Very good, Eddie,” of _Chin-Chin_. He is incredible; one wouldn’t miss him for worlds; yet it is always what he does and not himself that constitutes the attraction. I wonder whether I do not wrong him altogether by classing him with the one-men, for it was always something more than Montgomery and Stone in the days of _The Red Mill_ and Stone does not exaggerate himself on the stage. His command of attributes is greater than that of any other player; he does everything with a beautiful, errorless accuracy--and the pleasure of seeing things _exactly right_, all the time, is not to be underestimated.

By Roland Young]

It is Ed Wynn’s pleasure to make everything seem utterly haphazard. Wynn is a surd in the theatre--there is always something left unresolved in reducing him to the lowest term, and he is incommensurable because there are no standards for him and no similars. I prefer to see him wandering through a good revue, changing hats, worrying about a “rewolwer” in the first scene and stopping dead in the twentieth to declare that it wasn’t a “rewolwer” at all, but a pistol. When he came to put on a one-man show he preserved the best part of this incoherence. He made it his business to appear before a drop curtain and explain in an amazing vocabulary and with painstaking gravity exactly what was to occur in the next scene. He affects to be awkward (to quote him, I might go so far as to call him uncouth.... I think I _will_ call him uncouth.... He is uncouth); his gestures are florid and wide, his earnestness makes all things vivid. Each of these explanations involves a bad pun and none, of course, has anything to do with the scene that actually follows. Like Jolson and Cantor, he takes the stage at a given moment and entertains. His famous inventions seemed to be the crudest form of humour--a typewriter carriage for eating corn on the cob, a burning candle to set in one’s ears in order to wake up in time--yet sheer ebullition carried them high into the field of “nice, clean fun.” Wynn’s words come tumbling out of him, agglutinated, chaotic, disorderly; he is abashed by his own occasional temerity, he is timid and covers it with brashness--and all of this is a carefully created personage; it is _not_ Ed Wynn. He has found a little odd corner of life which no one else cultivates; it is a sort of rusticity in the face of _simple_ things; he is a perpetual immigrant obsessed by hats and shoes and words and small ideas, instead of bothering about skyscrapers. The deepness of his zanylike appreciation of every-day things is the secret of his capacity for making them startling and funny. His one fault is the show with which he surrounds himself.

I have never seen Elsie Janis better than she was in _The Lady of the Slipper_--with the exception of Gaby Deslys I have never seen any woman comparable to Miss Janis in that piece, and in it she had qualities which ought to have made her appearance in an individual show a much greater success than it actually turned out to be. For, except a voice, Miss Janis has everything. She is a beautiful dancer and her legs are handsomer than Mistinguett’s, and she is the finest mimic I have ever seen on the stage, several shades ahead of Ina Claire. An exceptional intelligence operates in the creation of these caricatures, for they are all created by seizing upon vital characteristics of tone, gesture, tempo of movement, spirit; and the arrangement of her hair and the contortions of her face are only guide-signs to the accomplished act. She is herself of an abounding grace, a suppleness of body and of mind, and the measure of her skill is the exact degree in which her grace and simplicity are transformed into harshness or angularity or sophistication as she passes one after another of our stage personalities before her mirror. This year I saw her in a Paris music-hall take off Mistinguett and Max Dearly. She presented them singing _Give Me Moonlight_ in their own imagined versions and her throaty “Give me a gas light” for the creator of _Mon Homme_ was superb. She offered to sing it, at the end, as she herself ought to sing it--and danced it without uttering a sound. It reminded one of Irene Castle in _Watch Your Step_. For an exact calculation of her capacities and a sensible, modest intention to stay within them and to exploit them to the limit are parts of Elsie Janis’s intelligence. To be sure, it isn’t her intelligence--it is her loveliness and her talent that endear her to us. But it is grateful, for once in a way, to find a talent so great, a loveliness so irresistible, joined to an intelligence which sets all in motion and spoils nothing.

I suspect that in spite of the best of the one-man shows there is something wrong with the idea--perhaps because the environment requires more than any man has yet been able to give. And the one perfect example is, as I have suggested, proof of this. Because _Stop! Look! Listen!_ which was only a moderate success on Broadway and involved the talents of Gaby Deslys, Doyle and Dixon, Harry Fox, Tempest and Sunshine, the beautiful Justine Johnston, Helen Barnes, Helen Dryden as costumer and Robert McQuinn as scenic designer, a beautiful chorus and an excellent producer, was actually the one-man show of Irving Berlin. For once a complete and varied show expressed the spirit of one man to perfection. In that piece, Berlin wrote two of his masterpieces and about four other superb songs; and, more than that, suffused the entire production with the gay spirit of his music. There occurred _The Ragtime Melodrama_ danced by Doyle and Dixon--only the Common Clay scene from the Cohan revue ever approached it, and Doyle and Dixon never danced better (unless, possibly, a quarter of an hour earlier in _The Hula-Hula_); there was _The Girl on the Magazine Cover_, perfectly set and costumed, a really good sentimental song with its quaint introduction of _Lohengrin_ (not the _Wedding March_); there was _When I Get Back to the U. S. A._ sung against a chorus of _My Country, ’Tis of Thee_; there was Gaby’s wicked _Take Off a Little Bit_ and Harry Fox’s _Press-Agent Song_--and finally the second of Berlin’s three great tributes to his art: _I Love a Piano_, which, like the mother of Louis Napoleon, he wrote for six pianos and in which everything in syncopation up to that time was epitomized and carried to a perfect conclusion. Whatever was gay, light, colourful, whatever was accurate, assured, confident, and good-humoured, was in this miraculous production. I saw it twelve times in two weeks--lured partly, I must confess, by the hope that Harry Pilcer would break at least a leg in his fall down the golden stairs. He never did; in spite of which, seeing it again, months later, it still seemed to me the apotheosis of pure show. I think I could reconstruct every moment of it, including the useless plot and Justine Johnston’s ankles; it seems a pity that all of it, the ephemeral and the permanent, should have already passed from the stage. It was a beginning in ragtime operetta which Mr Berlin has never followed up; his inexhaustible talents have been diverted into other things; he is now a maker of revues. Yet when he saw _The Beggar’s Opera_, Mr Berlin felt something plucking at his sleeve, reminding him that it was his job, and his alone, to create the comparable type for America.

At that moment he thought back to _Stop! Look! Listen!_--but he had already begun to build the Music Box--and we must wait patiently for what time will bring as a real successor to his one-man show. At any rate, we have had it. We know, now, what it can amount to--and it is enough. Enough, at any rate, to put the veritable one-man show fairly definitely out of the running.

_The Dæmonic in the
American Theatre_

THE DÆMONIC IN THE AMERICAN THEATRE

One man on the American stage, and one woman, are possessed--Al Jolson and Fanny Brice. Their dæmons are not of the same order, but together they represent all we have of the Great God Pan, and we ought to be grateful for it. For in addition to being more or less a Christian country, America is a Protestant community and a business organization--and none of these units is peculiarly prolific in the creation of dæmonic individuals. We can bring forth Roosevelts--dynamic creatures, to be sure; but the fury and the exultation of Jolson is a hundred times higher in voltage than that of Roosevelt; we can produce courageous and adventurous women who shoot lions or manage construction gangs and remain pale beside the extraordinary “cutting loose” of Fanny Brice.

To say that each of these two is possessed by a dæmon is a mediæval and perfectly sound way of expressing their intensity of action. It does not prove anything--not even that they are geniuses of a fairly high rank, which in my opinion they are. I use the word possessed because it connotes a quality lacking elsewhere on the stage, and to be found only at moments in other aspects of American life--in religious mania, in good jazz bands, in a rare outbreak of mob violence. The particular intensity I mean is exactly what you do not see at a baseball game, but may at a prize fight, nor in the productions of David Belasco, nor at a political convention; you may see it on the Stock Exchange and you can see it, canalized and disciplined, but still intense, in our skyscraper architecture. It was visible at moments in the old Russian Ballet.

In Jolson there is always one thing you can be sure of: that whatever he does he does at the highest possible pressure. I do not mean that one gets the sense of his effort, for his work is at times the easiest seeming, the most effortless in the world. Only he never saves up--for the next scene, or the next week, or the next show. His generosity is extravagant; he flings into a comic song or three-minute impersonation so much energy, violence, so much of the _totality_ of one human being, that you feel it would suffice for a hundred others. In the days when the runway was planked down the centre of every good theatre in America, this galvanic little figure, leaping and shouting--yet always essentially dancing and singing--upon it was the concentration of our national health and gaiety. In _Row, Row, Row_ he would bounce up on the runway, propel himself by imaginary oars over the heads of the audience, draw equally imaginary slivers from the seat of his trousers, and infuse into the song something wild and roaring and insanely funny. The very phonograph record of his famous _Toreador_ song is full of vitality. Even in later days when the programme announces simply “Al Jolson” (about 10.15 P.M. in each of his reviews) he appears and sings and talks to the audience and dances off--and when he has done more than any other ten men, he returns and, blandly announcing that “You ain’t heard nothing yet,” proceeds to do twice as much again. He is the great master of the one-man show because he gives so much while he is on that the audience remains content while he is off--and his electrical energy almost always develops activity in those about him.

FANNY BRICE
]

If it were necessary, a plea could be made for violence _per se_ in the American theatre, because everything tends to prettify and restrain, and the energy of the theatre is dying out. But Jolson, who lacks discipline almost entirely, has other qualities besides violence. He has an excellent baritone voice, a good ear for dialect, a nimble presence, and a distinct sense of character. Of course it would be impossible not to recognize him the moment he appears on the stage; of course he is always Jolson--but he is also always Gus and always Inbad the Porter, and always Bombo. He has created a way of being for the characters he takes on; they live specifically in the mad world of the Jolson show; their wit and their bathos are singularly creditable characteristics of themselves--not of Jolson. You may recall a scene--I think the show was called _Dancing Around_--in which a lady knocks at the door of a house. From within comes the voice of Jolson singing, “You made me love you, I didn’t wanna do it, I didn’t wanna do it”--the voice approaches, dwindles away, resumes--it is a swift characterization of the lazy servant coming to open the door and ready to insult callers, since the master is out. Suddenly the black face leaps through the doorway and cries out, “We don’ want no ice,” and is gone. Or Jolson as the black slave of Columbus, reproached by his master for a long absence. His lips begin to quiver, his chin to tremble; the tears are approaching, when his human independence softly asserts itself and he wails, “We all have our _moments_.” It is quite true, for Jolson’s technique is the exploitation of these moments; he has himself said that he is the greatest master of hokum in the business, and in the theatre the art of hokum is to make each second count for itself, to save any moment from dulness by the happy intervention of a slap on the back, or by jumping out of character and back again, or any other trick. For there is no question of legitimacy here--everything is right if it makes ’em laugh.

He does more than make ’em laugh; he gives them what I am convinced is a genuine emotional effect ranging from the thrill to the shock. I remember coming home after eighteen months in Europe, during the war, and stepping from the boat to one of the first nights of _Sinbad_. The spectacle of Jolson’s vitality had the same quality as the impression I got from the New York sky line--one had forgotten that there still existed in the world a force so boundless, an exaltation so high, and that anyone could still storm Heaven with laughter and cheers. He sang on that occasion _’N Everything_ and _Swanee_. I have suggested elsewhere that hearing him sing _Swanee_ is what book reviewers and young girls loosely call an experience. I know what Jolson does with false sentiment; here he was dealing with something which by the grace of George Gershwin came true, and there was no necessity for putting anything over. In the absurd black-face which is so little negroid that it goes well with diversions in Yiddish accents, Jolson created image after image of longing, and his existence through the song was wholly in _its_ rhythm. Five years later I heard Jolson in a second-rate show, before an audience listless or hostile, sing this outdated and forgotten song, and create again, for each of us seated before him, the same image--and saw also the tremendous leap in vitality and happiness which took possession of the audience as he sang it. It was marvelous. In the first weeks of _Sinbad_ he sang the words of _’N Everything_ as they are printed. Gradually (I saw the show in many phases) he interpolated, improvised, always with his absolute sense of rhythmic effect; until at the end it was a series of amorous cries and shouts of triumph to Eros. I have heard him sing also the absurd song about “It isn’t raining rain, It’s raining violets” and remarked him modulating that from sentimentality into a conscious bathos, with his gloved fingers flittering together and his voice rising to absurd _fortissimi_ and the general air of kidding the piece.

He does not generally kid his Mammy songs--as why should he who sings them better than anyone else? He cannot underplay anything, he lacks restraint, and he leans on the second-rate sentiment of these songs until they are forced to render up the little that is real in them. I dislike them and dislike his doing them--as I dislike Belle Baker singing _Elie, Elie!_ But it is quite possible that my discomfort at these exhibitions is proof of their quality. They and a few very cheap jokes and a few sly remarks about sexual perversions are Jolson’s only faults. They are few. For a man who has, year after year, established an intimate relation with no less than a million people, every twelvemonth, he is singularly uncorrupted. That relation is the thing which sets him so far above all the other one-man-show stars. Eddie Cantor gives at times the effect of being as energetic; Wynn is always and Tinney sometimes funnier. But no one else, except Miss Brice, so holds an audience in the hollow of the hand. The hand is steady; the audience never moves. And on the great nights when everything is right, Jolson is driven by a power beyond himself. One sees that he knows what he is doing, but one sees that he doesn’t half realize the power and intensity with which he is doing it. In those moments I cannot help thinking of him as a genius.

Quite to that point Fanny Brice hasn’t reached. She hasn’t, to begin with, the physical vitality of Jolson. But she has a more delicate mind and a richer humour--qualities which generally destroy vitality altogether, and which only enrich hers. She is first a great farceur; and in her songs she is exactly in the tradition of Yvette Guilbert, without the range, so far as we know, which enabled Mme Guilbert to create the whole of mediæval France for us in ten lines of a song. The quality, however, is the same, and Fanny’s evocations are as vivid and as poignant as Yvette’s--they require from us exactly the same tribute of admiration. She has grown in power since she sang and made immortal, _I Should Worry_. Hear her now creating the tragedy of _Second-Hand Rose_ or of the one Florodora Baby who--“five little dumbells got married for money, And I got married for love....” These things are done with two-thirds of Yvette Guilbert’s material missing, for there are no accessories and, although the words (some of the best are by Blanche Merrill) are good, the music isn’t always distinguished. And the effects are irreproachable. Give Fanny a song she can get her teeth into, _Mon Homme_, and the result is less certain, but not less interesting. This was one of a series of realistic songs for Mistinguett, who sang it very much as Yvonne George did when she appeared in America. Miss Brice took it _lento affetuoso_; since the precise character of the song had changed a bit from its rather more outspoken French original. Miss Brice suppressed Fanny altogether in this song--she was being, I fear, “a serious artist”; but she is of such an extraordinary talent that she can do even this. Yvonne George sang it better simply because the figure she evoked as Mon Homme was exactly the fake apache about whom it was written, and not the “my feller” who lurked behind Miss Brice. It was amusing to learn that without a Yiddish accent and without those immense rushes of drollery, without the enormous gawkishness of her other impersonations, Miss Brice could put a song over. But I am for Fanny against Miss Brice and to Fanny I return.

Fanny is one of the few people who “make fun.” She creates that peculiar quality of entertainment which is wholly light-hearted and everything else is added unto her. Of this special quality nothing can be said; one either sees it or doesn’t, savours it or not. Fanny arrives on the scene with an indescribable gesture--after seeing it twenty times I believe that it consists of a feminine salute, touching the forehead and then flinging out her arm to the topmost gallery. There is magic in it, establishing her character at once--the magic must reside in her incredible elbow. She hasn’t so much to give as Jolson, but she gives it with the same generosity, there are no reserves, and it is all for fun. Her Yiddish Squow (how else can I spell that amazing effect?) and her Heiland Lassie are examples--there isn’t an _arrière-pensée_ in them. “The Chiff is after me ... he says I appil to him ... he likes my type ...” it is the complete give away of herself and she doesn’t care.

AL JOLSON
]

And this carelessness goes through her other exceptional qualities of caricature and satire. For the first there is the famous Vamp, in which she plays the crucial scene of all the vampire stories, preluding it with the first four lines of the poem Mr Kipling failed to throw into the wastepaper basket, and fatuously adding, “I can’t get over it”--after which point everything is flung into another plane--the hollow laughter, the haughty gesture, the pretended compassion, that famous defense of the vampire which here, however, ends with the magnificent line, “I may be a bad woman, but I’m awful good company.” In this brief episode she does three things at once: recites a parody, imitates the moving-picture vamp, and creates through these another, truly comic character. For satire it is Fanny’s special quality that with the utmost economy of means she always creates the original in the very process of destroying it, as in two numbers which are exquisite, her present opening song in vaudeville with its reiterations of Victor Herbert’s _Kiss Me Again_, and her Spring Dance. The first is pressed far into burlesque, but before she gets there it has fatally destroyed the whole tedious business of polite and sentimental concert-room vocalism; and the second (Fanny in ballet, with her amazingly angular parody of five-position dancing) puts an end forever to that great obsession of ours, classical interpretative dancing.

Fanny’s refinement of technique is far beyond Jolson’s; her effects are broad enough, but her methods are all delicate. The frenzy which takes hold of her is as real as his. With him she has the supreme pleasure of knowing that she can do no wrong--and her spirits mount and intensify with every moment on the stage. She creates rapidly and her characterizations have an exceptional roundness and fulness; when the dæmon attends she is superb.

It is noteworthy that these two stars bring something to America which America lacks and loves--they are, I suppose, two of our most popular entertainers--and that both are racially out of the dominant caste. Possibly this accounts for their fine carelessness about our superstitions of politeness and gentility. The medium in which they work requires more decency and less frankness than usually exist in our private lives; but within these bounds Jolson and Brice go farther, go with more contempt for artificial notions of propriety, than anyone else. Jolson has re-created an ancient type, the scalawag servant with his surface dulness and hidden cleverness, a creation as real as Sganarelle. And Fanny has torn through all the conventions and cried out that gaiety still exists. They are parallel lines surcharged with vital energy. I should like to see that fourth-dimensional show in which they will meet.

_These, Too ..._

THESE, TOO ...

Remy de Gourmont has propounded, somewhere, an interesting theory. If life is worth anything _per se_, is the substance of the argument, then we do wrong to live it in a series of high moments separated by long hours of dulness. We ought to take the _amount_ of energy, or ecstasy, we possess, and spread it as thin as possible, relishing each moment for itself, each being as good as any other. (I do not mean that Gourmont endorsed this philosophy; he discussed it.) It is, of course, the logical conclusion of burning _always_ with a hard gemlike flame, for if one is to be always _anything_ it is more likely to be calm and languorous and reserved; that is the difference between burning and burning up--of which Pater was aware.

We have all had these days of halcyon perfection, when the precise degree of warmth was a miracle, when the aroma of a wine seemed to have the whole fragrance of the earth, when one could do anything or nothing and be equally content. In the presence of great works of art we experience something similar. We are suspended between the sense of release from life, the desire to die before the image of the supremely beautiful, and a new-found capacity for living. Our daily existence gives us no such opportunity; we cannot live languorously because we have no leisure, and we are compelled to be intense at rare intervals if life isn’t to be entirely a hoax and a bore. In the preoccupations of daily life a tragic incident or an outburst of temper or a perfectly cut street dress or the dark-light before a storm, may give us, apart from our emotional lives, the intensity we require. We rather defend ourselves from the impact of great beauty, of nobility, of high tragedy, because we feel ourselves incompetent to master them; we preserve our individual lives even if we diminish them.

The minor arts are, to an extent, an opiate--or rather they trick our hunger for a moment and we are able to sleep. They do not wholly satisfy, but they do not corrupt. And they, too, have their moments of intensity. Our experience of perfection is so limited that even when it occurs in a secondary field we hail its coming. Yet the minor arts are all transient, and these moments have no lasting record, and their creators are unrewarded even by the tribute of a word. A moment comes when everything is exactly right, and you have an occurrence--it may be something exquisite or something unnamably gross; there is in it an ecstasy which sets it apart from everything else. The scene of the “swaree” in the _Pickwick Papers_ has that quality; nearly the whole of _South Wind_ has it (I choose examples as disparate as possible). The whole performance of _Boris_ by Chaliapin (the second time he sang it at the Metropolitan on his second visit to the United States) had precisely the same exaltation--and Conrad Veidt as Cesare had one comparable moment: the breathless second when the draperies seem to cling to the ravished virgin in the hands of the Somnambulist. It is an unpredictable event; but there are those on whom one can count to approach it. All of those I am writing about here have given me that thrill at least once--and my memory goes back to these occasions, trying to catch the incredible moment again.

(_Courtesy of A. and C. Boni_)

LEON ERROL. By Alfred Frueh

]

It will be impossible to communicate even the sense of it unless the material be dissociated from the event. Surely there is nothing exquisite in the roaring charwoman created by George Monroe. He had to an inspiring degree the capacity to be one of those vast figures in Dickens--Mrs Gamp to perfection--and it is odd that another impersonator, Bert Savoy, should have created, in Margie, Mrs Gamp’s own confidante and admirer, the devoted Mrs Harris. George Monroe’s creation was huge and cylindrical--more like a drainpipe than a woman in shape. There was no effort at realism, for Monroe roared in a deep bass voice, and his “Be that as it ma-a-y” was a leer in the face of all logic, order, and decency. There was in it an unrestraint, a wildness, an independent commonness which rendered it immortal. The creation of Bert Savoy is at the other extreme. It is female impersonation and the figure is always the same--the courtesan whose ambition it is to be a demi-mondaine. Savoy makes capital of all his defects down to the rakish slanting hat over one eye. His repetitions, apparently so spontaneous, are beautifully timed and spaced; the buzz and pause in the voice--“you muzzt com’over ... you don’t know the ha-ff of it, dear-ie” fix themselves in memory. He is remembered for the excellent stories he tells, and they are worth it, but the interpolations are funnier than the climax. The audacity is colossal and disarming. The occurrence of a character out of Petronius on our stage is exceptional in itself, that it should at the same time be slightly vicious and altogether charming, funny and immoral and delicate, is the wonder.

Last year there was an added touch, when Savoy danced while he sang a stanza about the Widow Brown. It was as delicate, it passed as quickly, as breath on a windowpane.[15]