Judge — April 26, 1930 — page 18: what you’re looking at

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

MUWGW METIUNG “House Afire,” S by Mann Page, kept me in the Little Theatre until one of the women characters remarked, “We keep a buc : one of the men wittily replied, over at our house house is so full of budgets Te: bud: That was about twenty min utes after the first act started. My only apology for hanging around that long was my bility to find my hat, which had disappeared from under my nd somehow peculiarly —I make chair no direct usations—found its way in a very odd manner to the one oceu- pied by Mr. Claude Grencker, of the Shubert staff, whose own hat, if. the truth must be known, has for years been nothing to br: Maybe, however, it was just hero-worship and a penchant for collecting souvenirs of the great. What went on during the aforesaid twenty minutes was enough to dis per audience even without the budget gi: When the curtain went up, it was loudly announced by a the house to the being maneuvered by buneh- light with a red gelatine slide in front of it and a sts 1 lustily putting t of a Cremo. After some running in and out, the chatelaine of the burning house was carried in, ex- cessively swell in’ a peach-colored kimono from Saks. Following a small boy's expressed wish that it was the school-house that had burned down 1, someone proposed a drink and 1a bottle of home brew that squirted all over the piano, bringing a great laugh from that portion of the audience that didn’t leave even after the budget gag. It now developed that the woman whe burned 1 of it because she was tired of living in the suburbs and wanted to live in New York, where, she said, one could go to the opera and Il the plays, “House Afire” infer- entially included. “I want to live in an apartment,” she eri ‘ smoke house had see JUDGE Gr ee SANOWS GEORGE JEAN It yets to own you instead of Then everybody took budget gag made it you owning it, a drink and the waste of production money on such shabby drivel makes one again at what goes on in the heads of rlete wavthlesaness play with a theme » this could hardly make much impression upon even the more boobish New York customers, al > of whom dreams of getting out of an « they'd think the whole idea completely svnice Cuevatinn lately played a as the se aond part of the I ans on the loose in Paris, among even three who can understand French. mensely likeable member of the | vard Mannerel a fellow of ex- > rendered a few relativ - nocent little things which tickled the Broadway ites monolingual nother ina wicked news as their plea- > theoretical sauciness of rics that when the Mons. Mau- rice went into a couple of talkie theme songs in English their dejection was , although one the movie songs was every bit as sug- gestive as the stuff he sang in French. Chevalier was preceded on the pro- Club jes band, which for ne a violent and vi His Lordship Ellington's his band succeeded in’ manufacturing hasn't been matched since the Argonne and Robert B. Mantell’s “King Lear.” * 8 « Pie Belmont Theatre, that seems to have more trouble than Edythe Totte rd of, n long ago opened itself up again with something billed as “Broadway Sl ows,” by Mr. Willard Earl Simmons. Where the management of the Bel- mont hit on this one is just as much of an eniy as where it hit on the four or five exhibits that briefly pre- ceded it. To simply that it was had is to lay one’s self open to a of log-rolling. Nothing worse herself ever he: ch has ever been uncovered—even at the Belmont. Among the individuals who appeared on the pl the pre form and whom am listed as actors were tists as Leo Dawn, M y Marie Polizzotto, i It's won and get a dramatic critic into all the plays for nothing. I is a cause for some surprise that the Theat Guild — overlooked “Troyka,” put on recently at the Hud- son. "It is so like the kind of forei stuff the Guild has been falling for in the last few years that it is hard to figure out how that organization avoided buying it, producing it in the name of the higher art, and register- ing another flop. By the Hungarian Fazel athor of “Altona,” the hot bawdy-house play that has seared the life out of even Al Woods, it contains much that is generally sweet to the Guild's tooth. It is laid in a Russian prison settlement; it is full of Ivans, Gustoffs, Bogulieffs, Pushkins, Dy- movs and ffs; it bursts with such lines as “Freedom is but another form of imprisonment”; it offers opportu- nity for groupings of supers 4 la Rein- hardt; it announces that the czar h been duly dumped on the ash and it is a thorough and magnificent hore. aN, (Continued on page 29) comicbooks.com