New Plays in Manhattan

Jerry for Short. William A. Grew, author of the smut-cracking comedy My Girl Friday, was mistakenly encouraged by its profits to display this naive anecdote of innocence in Westchester County. In it romance is made difficult for a youth of the aristocracy and a peasant virgin; difficult also for Fiske O'Hara, who plays the lead and tries to ingratiate his audience by chatting and singing to them in an entr'acte.

Dinner is Served. To Manhattan's dramatic critics, sneaking back to their kennels, scorched an unwholesome yellow by the country sun, this dull trifle was used as an excuse for bored and wintry sarcasms. It repeated, stupidly, the theatrical cliche of the wife who wanted her husband to love her and whose trite appetites were gratified through the complicating assistance of her husband's friend. Alan Mowbray, of Theatre Guild scrub casts, wrote it himself, a handicap which his histrionic ability was not sufficient to overcome.

Murray Anderson's Almanac is a happy though pretentious volume of which the first illuminated pages cast scorn upon the antiquities of the U. S. theatre and the latter, through the agencies of Jimmy Savo, Trixie Friganza, Roy Atwell and Fred Keating, celebrate in the most conventionally spectacular manner the excellencies of the contemporary revusical. Whatever may be the faults of the contemporary revusical, such entertainments usually profit from the services of a superlative clown, and Jimmy Savo is such a one.

Trixie Friganza, a survival of the age which the Almanac lampoons, floats laughably about the stage, an hilarious Zeppelin brightened with a Mazda smile. "How is my dear old mother tonight?" someone asks her. "Lousy," she replies. Fred Keating, a magician by trade, stuffs birds down his shirt front in a highly invisible manner while acting as master of the rakish ceremonies. Noel Coward, Peter Arno, John McGowan and most admirably Rube Goldberg are implicated in suitable capacities, as is the author of a song called, "I May be Wrong." Credit for the rest of the Almanac's sophisticated virtues should be laid to John Murray Anderson, its organizer and producer, and to Gil Boag, its $180,000 angel, hitherto famed variously and not least for being a onetime husband of Gilda Gray.

Trixie Friganza celebrates her 40th year of fun-making this autumn. She hopes to round out a half-century before retiring. Not sad to her is the thought of what a volatile young thing she used to be. Still volatile, she refuses to think backwards, even to the bird-and-bottle parties at Delmonico's which were lavished upon chorus girls in the age of gallantry. To old codgers in club windows she leaves the memory of how she first starred in Pearl of Peking (1889). Her business is "the laugh business," which she studies seriously. Her last success before this one was Lavinia in Hit the Deck. Her home is in Hollywood, where she has learned to apply her grease paint with water, to like "being alone with a good book."