Judge — May 24, 1919 — page 22: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

T H ES HEN “Cappy H OW S H O P could readily be counted on Ricks “departed from Broadway, with it went the last survivor of the race of silk-hatted and led Cholly boys. Now that he has gone, let us, like the boarding-house gossips brace the opportunity to discuss His name was Ce Pericles Ba ic foiling. Old Tom Wise as Ricks, president and chief blusterer of the shipping line, needed some shrimp to pick on, so that when Matt Peasley, the spunky young skipper, put something over on the old cuss it vould seem an achievement by contrast. Accordingly the dapper fopling, sent by papa to learn the shipping business, under Ricks’ explosive tutels the San Francisco headquarters with full Cholly boy equipment, even to the English accent. The contrast tween this cane-twiddling silly ass and the old rhinoc- eros-in-the-rough makes for absurd situations. Ricks is afforded opportunities for fulminatir shaking a monocled monkey. Picturesque, yes, but improbable to the point of piffle. How could anyone for a moment accept this neo-Dundreary as a “young New Yorker”? (The pro- gram styles him with withering sarcasm as “from the East.) It is explained in the play that he is a rich man’s son and that he has never taken an interest in anything but chorus girls. Granting these facts, I ask you, patient reader, (if you are still with me) how long would that silk hat simp have lasted in the great city? And how would he get that way in the first place? Rich men’s sons pre- sumably go to college and belong to clubs: would his classmates—always merci- lessly alert to the idiosyn- cracies of their fellow-men —have let him live? It would quickly have been a case of requiescat in the 39 East,” em- at our case. nard and his bus- ows up at dire means of Jown such Much as I hate to dash the illusions of people in sequestered provinces who like to picture the social high flyers of New York in cir awful glitter, I compelled to report young men in their twenties do not wear silk hats in the morning—es- pecially when calling at business offices, and that the number of monocles exhibited by Americans in the best clubs of the city Elizabeth Risdon, 22 Boob Brummels By Lawton Mackatr ; Dear Brutus,” all packed up for Barrie's Whimsy Land, where wices and seeethearts get od the fingers of one thumb. Yet Cecil Pericles retains his monocle and his English accent even when wearir dock laborer’s clothes, gain- ing easy laughs thereby These Chollyisms have a symbolic significance in being things held over, just as he is a type held over from comedy of a decade ago. He is the silly ass that we always used to laugh at. Once he was an out and out Englishman. To call him now a modern New Yorker hardly makes him more convincing. Last season when there was at least one spy in every melodrama plot, the silly ass personality came in handy as a disguise. ‘The Man Who Stayed at Home out- foxed the Huns by masquerading as a la-de-da coward, just as the hero of “Watch Your Neighbor” perplexed even his subordinates by affecting the dallysome du 1 nothing on his mind but a glossw cylinder. } he boob Brummel appears to be gone from adway forkeeps. But you never can tell. Mean- while his soul goes mincing on in the cheerful all-dressed- up-and-nobody-home of to-day—the chap who keeps getting bright ideas of approximately one-sixteenth c e power. Jimmy Potter, in “ast Is West,” ex- cellently played by Hassard Short, is irrepressibly boob- ful all evening. In “I Love You,” another Jimmy is bland protagonist of the kidding. He harbors (in s low anchorage) the fatuous notion that love may be in- duced by carefully prepared propinquity; that if he’s and she’s” are artfully brought together, Cupid will follow instructions and shoot on the dotted line of associations—in short, that romantic atmosphere may be scientifically concocted. Well, Jimmy does concoct his “ never-fail setting "— lights turned low, sofa ‘for two, with a volume of amorous verses convenient and soft music sounding from the —garden—and then quite the wrong pco- ple fall into his heart-trap; his best-laid atmosphere reacts upon his own fiancée id the man who came to fix the electric lights. Fashions and manners change with the times—or rather stage types are sel- dom more than a d le ow decade out of date—but asininity springs eternal. You and 1 so fre- quently make blithering idiots of ourselves that it is a pleasure to go to the theatre and see somebody else doing it for a change.