Judge — April 18, 1925 — page 29: what you’re looking at

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

ee Tt i's old) restaurant but what is actually called the — Fifty-second Street Theater, prints this note conspicuously in its programs: “We hope to produce the best available plays audiences of adult intelli- gence.” The first play produced by The ers is “Tue Bue Peter,” by E. Temple Thurston. Buve Perer” is the best available play that ‘The Stagers could lay their hands on, and if The Stagers believe that it is a play for audiences of adult intelligence, all I can say is that The Stagers are badly in need of some good advice. Five times better plays than this one are readily avail- able, and, so far as audiences of adult intelligence go, even it Fatt Guy” would gratify them five as much as the Thurston opus. The play which The Stagers have selected to uplift the stage in this country is the old one about the married man who Jongs again for freedom and adventure. After a prologue, laid in Bushwa, Nassawara Province, Central Africa, wherein a hell of a lot of shooting is somewhat cryptically supposed to convey a romantic atmosphere to the audi- ence’s adult intelligence, the action passes to the hero's house in Liver- “Overture to William Tell.” AND, AS FAR AS BOOK AGE x tee \, vad %, Seaiiia-s S WERE CONCERNED They Liced Happily Ever After pool. Here the bewhiskered dia- logue about freedom gets under way between the hero and his wife. The hero hears Bushwa calling him, and he decides to leave hearth and home and go back where men are men and fleas are fleas. But the next act, laid in ¢ water-front barroom, brings him to change his mind. And the a A last act finds him back home sending in his subscription to the Ladies’ Home Journal. One or two pas- sages in the play are not so bad— rly a scene in the second act between a loose baby and the hero— but in the aggregate the exhibit is directed chiefly at- an intelligence somewhere between thi f eight I ten. Edward Goodinan is the producer of the Thurston bauble. The M. Goodman is a skillful young man when it comes to staging plays, but on this occasion he has pe itted a number of directing monkeyshines to corrupt his work. I name one: the direction of portions of Act II wherein, in an effort to achieve realism, he bh ‘oup of actors at stage right cl away for dear life while the author's dialogue is going on at stage left. This chatter, which, so I can make out, is made up by the actors as they go along and which—unless my ear de- ceives me—consists of mumbled re- marks about Dodge automobiles, Peggy Hopkins, the Mirador res- taurant, the Algonquin Hotel and other things not especial! - connected with the play—this chatter, as I say, drowns out the dialogue of the central actors almost entirely, and makes the scenes in which Goodman incor- porates it unintelligible. T wish The Stagers all the good luck in. the world, but they had best get to- gether some morning soon and talk things over. comicbooks.com