Judge — July 11, 1925 — page 18: what you’re looking at

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

rage in the Argonne, learned that they were both members of the same college fraternity, and spent the next half-hour discussing the sweetness of the girl they both loved and who was waiting wistfully for them behind the old mill back home; the detective play in which the bullet found in the deceased’s kidney was of a caliber different from that of the accused hero’s revolver; the polite drawing-room comedy in “ which the front door-bell was heard “The Gorilla” to ring like a fire alarm every time A : lieutenants were brought suddenly QM MING UP GUAM APTN” together in the thick of a bar- — “Sit right here and don’t move an inch.” “If anything happens I'll move two feet!” NLY one long practiced in mendacity could say that the theatrical season recently concluded was anything to brag about. The simple truth about it, taking it as a whole, is that it was approximately as elevating as a case of smallpox. There were a few things, to be sure, that tickled the fancy of the more critical rooster, but for every such gift from God there were twenty that made him long for the old days when any man who set fire to a theater was rewarded at the assizes with 100 pounds sterling, a two-acre chicken farm and the hand of the most beautiful local dairymaid. I am well aware that however good a theatrical season may be, it always has the trick of seeming pretty bad in retrospect. But there is no trick about this last season. It was just as sour as it seems looking back at it. The managers appear to have believed that the way to work up a great artistic excitement in the community was to put on either a play in which a lady of joy made Little Eva look like a scarlet woman by the time the last act came around or one in which the ghost that haunted the old house turned out to be a member of the Actors’ Equity Associa- tion. Other tidbits which they vouchsafed the art lovers were the war play in which two a visitor called; the Manhattan-Manchester species of play in which the husband, learning that his wife was to become the mother of the baby of another man, gave the latter a jolly whack on the back and invited him to have a whisky and soda; and the box-office hornswoggler that was in essence nothing more than an old Paul Armstrong play given a kick by a liberal injection of hot swear words. In addition to these, we were bemused by the play in which a forty-five year old actress palmed herself off as a cutie on eighty-year old Mr. J. Ranken Towse by putting on a blonde curly wig, tak- ing little running steps and periodic- ally sitting on her right foot; the play in which the worthless oil well turned out to be worth a billion dollars just “Proctor’s” “What do you do for your cold?” “Cough!” Julius Tannen— Palace” “The Waldorf is a wonderful hotel; I was standing in front of it only looking in and I was robbed of (Continued on page 30) comicbooks.com N\ = ss