Judge — June 7, 1924 — page 22: what you’re looking at

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

PLOT-DEUTSCH by George Jean Nathan T WE most amusing thing in The Ti thert, Richard Lorenz, i between Hunn-Boy Lew Fields and a comique named Jules Jordan. If the producer would only cut out the rest of the play, take this scene and build an entertainment fore and aft it which would include Joe Weber, Marie Dressler, Dailey, Charlie Bigelow, Willie Collier, Bonnie ¥ Edna Chase, and a few songs like “Rosie, You Are My Po: he would have a show that would be every bit as good as any that used to delight the connoisseurs at the old Weber and Vields Music Hall. Unfortunately, the aforesaid producer has not seen it my way, and has surrounded the scene with what is called a plot. scene, but one « Melody Man,” by scene in the second act however, This plot not only spoils the two other episodes that have a very fair degree of comic merit. It is too bad, because while the plot ix periodically: off sta garette and talking to the s some diverting moments. Some one should begin an anti-plot « an. The plot of every third play of Broadway manufacture spoils completely what is good in the play. A playwright thinks up a vivid or two and a mimber of amusing lines and then ruins the whole business by sticking into the evening the kind of plot which makes the two interesting cha act like idiots and which further causes the lost in the shutHe. Take this “Melody Man,” for ex- Tt has a couple of well-drawn characters and some gus scenes and dialect dialogue and proceeds to thumb its nose at these merits with a plot that tells how a song pub- lisher tries to win the maiden of his heart and how the trying reacts upon the maiden’s papa and the maiden’s erstwhile beau. Such a plot, of course, is not only enough to ruin a play © smoking a slagechands, the evening unto: charact acters suddenly mmusing lines SBMweos- + Amateur D. voted aga 20 like “The without f Lew we have. Melody Man”; it is enough r of contradiction and T feel Pamay say it to ruin even “Hamlet.” Fields is an admirable comedian—one of the best If T were his manager, Vd persuade him against these plays with plots if Thad to buy him fifty seidels of beer to do it. And, if Thad to buy him an additional fifty, to say nothing of a few Schweitzer cheese sandwiche dill pickle or two, I'd urge him to give us his exceptionally fine comic talents in a sort of German dialect “Charlot: Revue.” Then, after he had agreed to do so, Pd tell him the deal was off because L wouldn't know where to get the writers to write such a revue. und maybe a Il me Krevrzer Sonata” Jacob Gordin, has been revived by Bertha Nalich after something like seventeen years, by and is still the poor specimen of drama that it was something like seventeen years ago when it was considered at good specimen of drama. r persons who like plots, here is a tickler, “The Kreutzer Sonata,” indeed, is so full of plot that the author had no time left lo do anything about character. The plot is so thick that it oozes out of the play into the footlight trou There are a seduction, punch in the jaw, a suicide, a couple of murders, a scene in which aman illicitly bites a wench on the shoulder and tells her life is naught without her, a girl who steals her sister’s Inusband and a few other such morsels in this plot. Tt is all very loud and intense and furious and richly provocative of enmi. Madame Kalich has been likened by her press. agents to Bernhardt and Duse. I hope that these press agents will (Continued on page 25) and slops over into the orchestra pit. n illegitimate baby, some adultery Iler—Good Lord! When are they going to stop this sort of thing? I've often enough comicbooks.com