Life — January 8, 1925 — page 20: what you’re looking at

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

Let’s See, Now HERE is something about “The Youngest” which is like a charming, well-bred young man wandering about with amnesia. It has almost everything that a nice little comedy should have, except that it forgets where it is going and where it was half an hour before. Sometimes it even forgets to move. This does not prevent your enjoying each bit as it comes along, but i¢ does prevent your carrying away anything very definite as to just quod erat demonstrandum. Person- ally, we like plays which are just pleasant as they go along and prove nothing, but that probably isn’t the way to write plays. We have a feeling that Philip Barry didn’t write “The Youngest” that way either. It sounds as if it had been written by popular subscziption. Several people must have each brought something from home to put into it, like food for a picnic in the woods, with the result that it lacks a certain homogencity. There is a lot about a will and statute No. 356486 State of New York which stirred us only when the mention of the statute gave the hero a chance to say: “Statute of whom?” That shows the kind of theatregoer we are, but it’s too late to try to change now. 3% H YRY HULL makes up for a great deal of the dii- usion of “The Youngest” by a definite and straight- forward performance as the bedeviled young man. Katherine Alexander would make up for anything in the worst play in the world by simply walking across the set and laughing. Pretty soon we are going to get where we had rather watch Miss Alexander cross the set and hear her laugh than listen to Edith Wynne Matthison recite “The quality of mercy is not strained.” Maybe to-morrow. Le INCE Mr. Belasco has evidently decided that his new mission in the theatre is to spread the good news of the attraction of one sex for the other, we much prefer that he accomplish it through the medium of a play like “Ladies of the Evening” rather than one like “The Harem.” “Ladies of the Evening” is at least honest. In fact, when you take it for what it sets out to be, an old-fashioned, Grand Opera House morality play, with the girl who went wrong (Miss Beth Merrill) confronting the man who saved her (Mr. James Kirkwood) in the last act and falling into his arms, it is more than satisfactory in its cla: Its bits of explicit sex conversation (and pretty explicit they are, too, even to old men-of-the-world like the staff of this department) somehow ring true enough to make them no giggling matter; and there is one scene, wherein two young ladies entertain a couple of members of a watch- makers’ convention in their as-yet-unpaid-for suite in an Atlantic City hotel, which, unless we are very ingenuous, was written by Mr. Milton Gropper in all sincerity and with just a touch of bitterness at the ways of the world. The fact that Miss Edna Hibbard makes the age-old rdle of the slangy girl-friend (we use “slangy” in its broadest sense) exceedingly amusing and vivid does not detract from the essential sobriety of the scene. And the fact that Mr. John Carmody, Andrew, the inhibited watchmaker, is highly comic does not makes his presence in the room under the circumstances any the less depressing. We may be reading a mood into Mr. Gropper’s work which he was far from being in when he wrote it. It may be just a dirty play. It certainly is full of the old hoke. But even at that we prefer our dirt like this rather than as it is dished in the other current Belasco contribution to the American drama, “The Harem.” E took a look in at “The Show-Off” recently, rather apprehensive that the players in that year-old comedy might, by this time, be falling into the common habit among long-run actors of taking their success for granted and rattling along with their eyes half-closed and their minds on their supper. It was quite thrilling to find them all playing it better than when the play first opened. Espe- cially Helen Lowell, as the mother, has fought off what was an almost inevitable danger of over-acting, and is dis- playing a repression and delicacy in her characterization which, considering the length of the run, is almost unbe- lievable. On the other hand, “The Firebrand,” which has been a success for only a few months, is in danger of being turned into a rough-and-tumble revue-sketch by the grad- ually broadening slap-stick of the star, who, in a very obvious attempt to gather in laughs which were originally credited to Mr. Morgan, is mugging and bounding about, with here and there a few of Miss Beatrice Lillie’s ges- tures, and in general displaying signs of success-ennui which are usually found in a road company of the Passing Show of 1921. We would recommend that Mr. Schildkraut take an afternoon and see a matinee of “The Show-Off.” Robert Benchley. comicbooks.com