Judge — August 23, 1919 — page 24: what you’re looking at

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

m ty Jeu Dasiecs N the prude, rude days of your nonage, when the stage was nothing Mobile Melodrama from under the proscenium box at the extreme left of the glimpsed your seat if not artificial, “me- theatre, isn’t the guilty lerdrammer” held the Perriton Maxwett party. At one stage of the boards against all theatric game of “Butcher, butcher, comers. The actor who who is the butcher!” you should have so far forgotten his training and “the splendid old traditions of the art histrionic” as to talk like a human being, would have been booed into ob- livion and chucked from his profession body, boots and buskin. To mouth, strut, attitudinize was to hold “the mirror up to Nature.” The reflection must have made the dear old girl wince and count her wrinkles. Making a rounded period was a greater achievement than using the quotation marks of actuality. The play was the poor thing that converted a perfectly normal human into a raucous maniac, and mellerdram- mer was the actor's vehicle that creaked loudest when the rusty wheels of plot and action revolved the fastest. And now melodrama has returned to its very own, but in the Kuppenheimers of “show me’ ” sophistication and acute realism. Six new thrillers are playing on Broadway at the moment. Each bears the birthmark of melodrama undefiled, but, gosh all hemlock, how different from the frank and simple brand of the ancient Bowery! In the old manner one knew by the middle of the first act who it was that killed Cock Robin, and when the village idiot cried out “That’s him! I seen him stab Sir Reginald, with these very eyes of mine,” you knew whose hands were stained with the No. 1 rouge of man- slaughter in the first de- gree of makeup. It was then that you spread wide your palms, moistened your lips and prepared for the violent applause that had to follow the constable’s lines: ‘om Nutmeg, I ar- rest ye in the name o’ the law.” Whoopee! And now! Now you are led to suspect every member of the cast, from the gum-chewing office stenog. to the leading man’s white-wigged old mother. You are not at all certain that the electrician, whose shirt-sleeves you Rowe or “A Lostty * Company Looxine Preaseo Witn Her Bycosu Heancrar. Vioterre Witsox have arrived at the conclusion, through your clever powers of deduction and the man’s protracted absence, that the leader of the orchestra is the honest to Al. Woods’ murderer. A pleasant evening’s pastime this jig-saw puzzle of finding the man who did the dirty deed. And just when you've decided it is the nervous butler who justly awaits the steel bracelets of infamy, that quiet little mouse of a nursemaid who has had three lines and whom you have scarcely noticed, steps blandly forward, eyes front, and makes a nicely enunciated confession. But how much better the new way than the old! You get so much more today for your box-office after- the-war tax. There’s the play per se, the big punch and the exciting speculation. Modern melodrama has Wall Street beaten three ways from the ace in the mat- ter of guesswork, and into the bargain there is that delicious cerebral ooze which the psychoan- alysts, for lack of a longer name, call auto- hypnosis—the sensation of spoofing one’s ego by pretending there is a momentous problem tcbe solved, all the while knowing perfectly well thatif,in spite of theheat, you keep your seat to the bitter “tag,”the playwright will unravel the knitted sleeve of care and general hugger-muggery. Critical highbrows dearly love to wallow in the phrase “the decad- ence of the modern drah- mah.” That is their way of saying “punk.” They nourish a pet chilblain over the type of play which has no greater pretension than to furnish an evening’s entertain- ment. But there are still among us a few hardy managerial souls not afraid of keeping their fingers on the purse of the public, and to these savants of the stage we may confidently look to keep alight, with theirdollars, the living torch of mellerdrammer. comicbooks.com