New Plays

The Blue Peter. The wisemen, who are at once the surface and now and then the depth of Broadway show life, trooped expectantly to this first production of The Stagers. The group, which proposes to forge through a year of intelligent productions under this name, is headed by Edward Goodman. Mr. Goodman was of old the shepherd of the Washington Square Players in those days when the germ of the now imposing Theatre Guild was generating in Greenwich Village.

Mr. Goodman and his Stagers have made a good start. It can hardly be tailed brilliant, yet they are smartly away from the barrier and not far from the van. They produced a play by E. Temple Thurston about an Englishman who wanted to go back to the engaging path of his early adventuring in Africa. His wife persuaded him that Liverpool and love were better. An early scene in Africa and a barroom temptation episode round out the evening.

It was from this latter scene that the best acting was forthcoming. Mary Kennedy, for some years a competent but sparsely heralded assistant in the theatre, was responsible. She played a scarlet sister of the public house in a manner to cause both the wise and the uncomprehending to bristle with approval. Miss Kennedy, it may be noted, is a co-author of Mrs. Partridge Presents. A good play on one stage and a magnificent performance on another is a combination which few but her husband can match. He is Mr. Deems Taylor, who writes able music criticisms, entertaining music. (He composed the music of The Beggar on Horseback.)

The New York Evening Post--"With a better play, The Stagers will undoubtedly cut a fine figure."

The Little Minister. It was an unpleasant experience all around, this reopening of Barrie's 30-year-old candy box. It was sad for Barrie, because it showed that time has beaten those early imaginings of his. It was sad for Basil Dean, English director, because it showed (as in Hassan and Peter Pan) that he is second rate. It was chiefly sad for Ruth Chatterton, of whom Alexander Woollcott wrote: "Compared with this unhappy event [Miss Chatterton's playing], the selection of Marilyn Miller seemed nothing short of inspired." Maude Adams alone got praise.

For it was Maude Adams who, in 1897, first appeared as Lady Babbie. It was her first production as a star under the old Charles Frohman regime. Both actress and play were deemed discoveries. These facts, of course, made Miss Chatterton's hurdle higher. She summoned all her sweetness, all her coquetry and even a few of the music-hall mannerisms she acquired in the late and unlamented Magnolia Lady. She did not get over the hurdle.

The single satisfactory performance of the entertainment was offered by Ralph Forbes as Gavin. Mr. Forbes is Miss Chatterton's husband, lately acquired. He seems rather to have reversed the usual complication attendant upon marrying a famed actress.

The fragile sentiments of the narrative seemed stifled and oversweetened under the joint ministrations of Miss Chatterton and Mr. Dean. Heretics insisted that Barrie was in no small part to blame.

Stark Young--"I was surprised not to find The Little Minister a more worthwhile play."

Eve's Leaves. A vagrant project, of the type that annually prowls unheralded into a vacant theatre during the Lenten season of depression and low rentals, appeared under this curious cognomen. It told how women will do anything for clothes. Two in particular had only a paltry $40,000 income and longed to spend it all on evening wraps. They both got into difficulties, gave their husbands opportunity for angry exit. It was one of those high-society plays, written (by Harry Chapman Ford) in the best manner of burlesque and acted even beyond that inexpensive level. There have been one or two worse in this strange, contradictory season.

The Best Plays

These are the plays which, in the light of metropolitan criticism, seem most important:

Drama

WHAT PRICE GLORY ?--Blood drops, cognac and the rattle of ribald laughter that, combined, make war at once the business and the pastime of the U. S. Marines.

THEY KNEW WHAT THEY WANTED --The vineyards and the sunshine of California robbed of their sweetness and their light by a wayward wench from San Francisco who marries the master of the vineyard by mail.

SILENCE--H. B. Warner and a neatly glued mystery play which has been entertaining many and causing none to think.

THE WILD DUCK--A courageous and capable production of Ibsen's searching study in anti-idealism. A play one must not miss.

WHITE CARGO--Approaches its 600th local representation of white man and black woman difficulties in the wasted world of desert Africa.

OLD ENGLISH--George Arliss as a magnificent old man in a not intensely entertaining play by Galsworthy.

PROCESSIONAL--The Theatre Guild gone a little mad in a rude and irritating experiment in American expressionism. West Virginia coaltown life in the raw.

DESIRE UNDER THE ELMS--A harsh homily by Eugene O'Neill in which lonely New England grows bitter and starts murder in the family.

THE DOVE--A thumping and conventional melodrama of a Mexican dance-hall serviceably displayed by Holbrook Blinn and Judith Anderson.

Comedy

THE GUARDSMAN--Continental infidelities made plausible and brilliantly amusing by the flawless talents of Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne.

THE FALL GUY--Ernest Truex as the turning worm in a middle-class comedy that is first-class entertainment.

IS ZAT SO?--An evening with the cauliflower industry; in other words, a comedy about a couple of prizefighter s. One of the best.

SHE HAD TO KNOW--Grace George and Bruce McRae probe with delicate propriety the matter of sex appeal in a carefully correct wife.

THE FIREBRAND--Rowdy ramblings with Benvenuto Cellini and his racy friends of medieval Italy.

THE DARK ANGEL--An English comedy of manners, good and bad, after the War, wherein a girl's lover disappears and what she did about it.

THE SHOW-OFF--The man to whom every family gathering is a meeting of the world and every easy chair is a stump from which to make a speech.

BEGGAR ON HORSEBACK--The return of a curiously contrived satirical comedy that laughs at big business, art and social climbing.

PIGS--Clean, rural and generally amusing.

Musical

For the tom-toms and the strident laugh, the following are particularly effective: Ziegfeld Follies, Music Box, Rose-Marie, Lady, Be Good; The Student Prince.

Carnivora

Darius the Mede was a king and a wonder,

His eye was proud and his voice was thunder;

He kept bad lions in a monstrous den;

He fed up the lions on Christian men.

Darius the Mede was not an exceptionally cruel man. He merely pandered to the tastes of his subjects who, effete with a fin-de-siecle weariness, derived immense gratification from the spectacle of carnivorous animals at their meals. It is hard to think that so astute a monarch could have been vexed with the lion who succumbed to pity, shedding, it is said, small drops of woe when confronted with the lean and shivering Daniel. They only were cruel who jeered the gentle beast for his clemency.

More adept than even Darius were the Romans in exploiting the curious raptures which affect men upon seeing great animals loose and hungry. Their circuses sprang up, like huge granite toadstools, in every shamble of the later Empire. After they had observed the antics of the Huns who invaded Italy in the Fifth Century, however, the Romans' appetite for watching wild beasts at play disappeared. The brave days of the circus ended. Only in the last 100 years did circusing come back to honor as a profession. Last week, with many blazing announcements, the Ringling-Barnum Circus came out of winter quarters, began its 1925 season with an engagement in Manhattan.

Ringmasters in long red coats and stovepipe hats; white stallions more graceful than swans; blear-eyed elephants performing feats of incredible sagacity; chariot racers, trapeze artists, ladies in spangles who wear jeopardy like a flower in their hair, sword- swallowers, snake-charmers, clowns in shreds and patches, fat women, thin men--these blithe barbarians nightly astound sober Manhattan. But the circus this year is different--for one supreme reason: the carnivora are gone. There are no wild animal acts. No sharply smiling lady makes small boys lose their peanuts when she puts her golden head in the lion's mouth; no clown breathes the naughty story he will not tell the crowd into the leopard's sullen ear, most earnestly hoping that the creature will not take offense. The baleful tigers, too, are gone. Many marveled at this. "Who," they asked, "has at last discerned that the interest attending the feats of the clown and the lady rests on the expectation, nay, the hope, that they will be instantly devoured? Who has decided that, since it is so, the fever of those who rock with thrills at wild animal acts is not very different from that of the demobilized centurions who howled in the Roman hippodromes, or that of the sadistic Medes who jeered the gentle lion of Darius ?"

John T. and Charles Ringling are the men who keep the five rings spinning. Once there were seven Ringlings ringing; five are dead. John and Charles now run the business. In the old days, John was a clown, appeared twice daily under the big top, sang, with extraordinary results, a ditty entitled Root, Hog, or Die. He has been accredited the shrewdest of the seven circus boys; when they put on their first show, in 1882, in McGregor, Iowa, where they had been born, he was the one who collected the admission.-- In 1907, they bought all of the Barnum and Bailey interests at the absurdly low price of $410,000. Among the minor achievements of John Ringling is the acquirement of three Western railroads. Such is his knowledge of the route his circus must travel that he once won a bet of a dinner by demonstrating that he, blindfolded, could trace a railroad line from the capital of any state to the smallest town in the territory.

Now his big show is booked again. He still gives carnivora to the general. But now the wildest beasts are those individuals who frequent the circus in droves and have been known to strike women in the stomach with their fists when frustrated in the attempt to poison themselves with lemonade--the male children under twelve.

*Ten pins.