Judge — July 25, 1925 — page 18: what you’re looking at

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

‘ | Anse IN! Wodgt” His Bok xD SYou REMIND ME OF JOHN MOR MscIe” Ge Baer OMACIS “MR MecoRMACK’S NOT Av AccORDIAN PLAYER 7 5 yr *\WELE ~NEVTHER ARE YoU! = T THE present time, five theaters are run- ning full-blast on the Bowery. They embrace two Chinese and two Yiddish theaters and ‘one Italian theater. I went down the other night and had a look at them. The leading difference between these Yiddish theaters and the Broadway theaters is that one generally finds more Jews in the Broadway theaters. The Chinese theaters are chiefly remarkable for the amount of peanuts the Chinamen in the AS “elt” = ® Wer-rou-wherEd You GIT AAT RED Lastern 7” ia © AW Some DRUNIC LERT IT NEAR A BIG HOLE INWE Road DETECTIVE —"Wios “ase RE WES TALKING APOUT 7” , “GHGAR ALLEN POE'S THE ONLY ONE \ Kiow oF BY “tut name! ~WELL -GET HIM ON WE ‘PHONE /” ed aR 7 audience eat during the show. ‘The manager of one of the theaters informed me that, on the average, an audience of seven hundred Chinamen eats seven thousand bags of peanuts from eight o'clock to eleven. What is more, the Chinaman, I observed, appears to enjoy a peanut princi- pally because of the noise it makes. A theater full of Chinamen eating peanuts sounds like a Wild West show. The Chinaman has a tech- nique all his own for cracking the shells. ‘The mere Anglo-Saxon, un- versed in the culture of the East, simply cracks the peanut shell be- tween his thumb and forefinger and lets it go at that. But not the Chinaman, The Chinaman isn't content amateurishly to crack the peanut shell once; he must crack it four times—with his fingers first, S He GoRIE” then with his teeth, then with his shoe, and finally by sitting on it and bouncing up and down, A theater full of Chinamen eating peanuts is thus indistinguishable from a Robert B. Mantell per- formance of “King Lear.” The Italian theater is not so highly perfumed as the Yiddish and not so noisy as the Chinese, but it, too, has its individuality. The individu- ality of the Italian theater consists in its audi- ence’s enthusiasm. Where the Chinaman wouldn’t condescend to move so much as a muscle even if the villain of a play bit the heroine in two, and where the Yiddisher considers his money well spent if he is vouchsafed merely a couple of good cries, the Italian comports him- self in the theater something like a cross between a thunderstorm and an earthquake. He re- sponds to every stage emotion like an engine going toa four-alarm fire. If the heroine’s stern (Continued on page 30) comicbooks.com