August Forecast

A vast difference lies between those people who work in Manhattan theatres in July and those who work in August. July is the lean theatrical month. Then it is that lowly, hopeful playwrights take advantage of the heat, the consequent emptiness and availability of theatres. They present their dubious plays with groups of actors who cannot afford to be particular.

August, however, is unofficially recognized as the first month of the new season. Established dramatic chefs then send out appetizers, begin to announce the rich fare which is to follow. NowaDays, first play of the new season, is reviewed below. A forecast of other August theatrics follows.

David Belasco's It's a Wise Child, by virtue of its title and the presence of Harlan Briggs, spry farceur, should be racy, garrulous. A comedy, Dinner Is Served, by one Alan Mowbray, will include the author in its cast.

Murray Anderson's Almanac promises to rival Earl Carroll's Sketchbook (TIME, July 15) with seekers of chorus girls, guffaws and 4-4 time. Its writers include A. E. Thomas, playwright, Rube Goldberg and Ring W. Lardner, funnymen. It will serve to frame fat, raucous Trixie Friganza and Jimmy Savo, small comic. A modernized version of A Temperance Town, oldtime comedy by Charles Hoyt, will include incidental tunes. George M. Cohan will smilingly assume the stage as author and actor in Gambling.

NowaDays. When two girls fancy a man, everyone is apt to be perturbed, and someone, according to Playwright Arthur F. Brash, is likely to get killed. Barbara Herford and Paula Newhall bet fifty dollars over Boyd Butler, a robust footballer who was also greatly interested in such erudite matters as coin collections.

Deviously Paula set about her malefactions. First she led Boyd to believe that Barbara had merely been duping him. So much did this evidence of duplicity infuriate the upright fellow that he straightway became drunk and stole into the night with Paula. She took him to an unsavory rooming house, where a blue-chinned bootlegger appeared. Boyd sampled his wares and found them unpalatable. When the bootlegger asked for pay, Boyd refused. A tussle ensued. The bootlegger produced a revolver. Paula snatched a convenient bottle and felled him. Then while Boyd dropped in a drunken stupor over the bootlegger's corpse, guilty Paula crept away.

Later she showed her dingy colors by silently allowing the evidence to point toward Boyd as the murderer. When the truth threatened, she downed a dose of cyanide of potassium.

When his rum was refused, Edward Pawley in the role of the bootlegger stood outside the closed rooming house door and said: "You can go to hell." This and his subsequent remarks were murmurous realities. The rest was mere melodramatic pressure. Peggy Shannon, an advertised titian contest winner from Pine Bluff, Ark., flirted gaily through the first act but disappeared before the grim days set in.