New Plays

The Family Upstairs. The some-what rough and tumble domesticity of another $40-a-week family is herein chronicled. It is the same type of family that dwelt in the household of The Show-Off, possibly a notch or two more distinguished than the clattering denizens of The Fall Guy. These humans react in primitives. The chief feeling of a visitor within their precincts is laughter at their meddling monotonies tempered with sorrow for their errors.

The present play is based on the material of a sound idea, badly patched with vaudeville treatment. The story tells of a mother who tried so hard to get her daughter married that she smothered the engagement with her good intentions. She told the young man that they were comfortable, and that the daughter was not used to house work. Whereupon the girl, so shamed by these activities, renounced her outing in the country, deserted the lunchbox on the table and went in for a good cry. Father finally fitted things together for the final curtain.

Direction that was so obvious that it seemed at times burlesque blurred the virtues of the work. Fervent overacting also detracted. Ruth Nugent, quiet, direct, sometimes a little wistful amid the sub-Babbitt racket, mattered markedly. Altogether the piece is a doubtful value, and yet the first entertainment of the season for adult consideration.

Oh! Mamma served to bring Alice Brady back to the stage after years of doing nothing except Zander the Great for a brief season.

Miss Brady is too fine an emotional actress to spread her comic talent over a whole evening as she does in Oh! Mama! She has to try to be funny.

The complaint is, of course, relative. Alice Brady is so incomparably better as a comedienne than dozens of other actresses that her presence on the stage is a tonic. But she is so much better doing other things that the self comparison will not be downed.

This play is a stock importation from the Paris show-window. Possibly a trifle more complicated since the lady is married to one man, flirting with a second and in love with a third. The fact that the third is the son of the first by an earlier marriage accounts for the title -- if anything can account for so fearful a title. Why they did not rest in the Parisian name, Mile. Mama, is not known. Edwin Nicander and Kenneth MacKenna assist competently. The net result is a fair farce, fairly well done.

The Mud Turtle. Helen MacKellar is also back again, she after a briefer absence and one which scarcely washes away the muddy footprints of The Good Bad Woman (TIME, Feb. 23) across the public porch. That venture was an unwise effort at publicity. Miss MacKellar is really a pretty good actress. She shows it in the Mud Turtle.

Her part is that of a lunchroom waitress brought home to preside over the stormy table of a Minnesota farmer and his son. The farmer is harsh and dominant. The son is a trifle watery. He is also her husband. She spends her evening trying to distil him into a valid beverage with which to floor the father.

Gay Paree. When Artists and Models was finally fitted into the trousseau of a two hour entertainment there were a good many garments hanging on the Shubert books. These they gathered up, added a few more songs and sketches, and appeared with another show. They summoned Winnie Lightner, Chick Sale, Billy B. Van and a score or so of others. They managed a fair spectacle, noisy, rowdy in spots, and intermittently amusing.

Winnie Lightner is the loudest if not the funniest of prima donnas, Chick Sale the comic who so impudently apes a rural preacher; Billy B. Van the man who does fairly well anything he is called upon to do, which is as usual a good deal. Then there was music and chorus girls, and the joke about why Peggy Joyce never married Santa Claus*.

Bedrooms at Large

Last week A. H. Woods ("bedroom man") announced his intention of sending four companies in January among the smaller cities in an effort to rewin from the cinema the old precincts of the one-night stand. The sections covered will be:

New England.

Pennsylvania and upper New York.

The Middle West.

The Pacific Coast.

Mr. Woods defined his project further as an attempt to give young performers opportunity to try their talents. Probably each troupe will have a nucleus of seasoned workers. Added to these will be graduates of dramatic schools, struggling vaudeville folk, likely prospects from all manner of theatrical apprenticeships. He has gone so far as to solicit photographs and applications from the young and the ambitious, the countrywide.

The reader in any smaller cities who happens upon these lines should not suppose that Mr. Woods is attempting to foist upon him a traveling training school for panting thespians. He is too good a business man to send second rate stuff around the United States. His venture will be based on costs and profits. He will charge 50 cents and $1 for his entertainments. Capable, if unknown, actors can be hired from the proceeds of such a budget.

One-night stands will be given glimpses of Broadway entertainments which they could never see except in expensive visits to various metropoles. Unquestionably the backbone of the Woods reclame will have an important place. Fair and Warmer, Potash and Perlmutter, and the other certainties of entertainment established by this ingenious impressario will necessarily predominate to assure success. Other, later plays will be included. Now and then he will insert a new play, which Broadway itself has never seen, for purpose of try-out.

The plan is frankly an experiment. It is axiomatic in show business of late years that touring companies, outside of the largest cities, will encounter indifferent auditors, if any. So many bad shows have gone out at high prices that the canny citizen prefers to pay a minor fee and while away his evening at the cinema where he has seen too many tawdry trifles to expect great things.

Mr. Woods will not bill his displays as "original New York productions." His dollar tourists will be ones whose talents have not yet, for the most part, caught the suspicious eye of the metropolis. And their talents are too tenuous it is a sure conclusion that the even more suspicious eyes of smaller cities will not watch their attitudes with any friendliness. And no one is more aware of this than A. H. Woods.

*Because there isn't any Santa Claus.