New Plays in Manhattan

A Glass of Water. About one hundred years ago Parisian society waxed ecstatic over the plays of a romanticist, Augustin Eugene Scribe, whose name is still glamorous to many drama students. Anyone who wishes to learn what ridiculous and hollow charades enthralled Paris of the '305 and '405 may now see the American Laboratory Theatre perform a play of Scribe's in which Queen Anne of England, the Duchess of Marlborough and a simple heroine named Abigail Churchill vie with each other for the favors of a Captain of the Guards. The entanglements are also political. Attired in picturesque costumes designed by Jean Bilibine, painted by Jacob Anchutin and executed by P. & A. Badulin, the members of this earnest little theatre give an incredibly bad account of themselves.

Flying High. Producer George (Scandals) White, like Producer Florenz (Follies) Ziegfeld, no longer limits himself to the episodic frivolities of the revue, but now shapes the same sort of entertainment to form musicomedies. The chief attraction of Flying High is a onetime vaudeville comedian named Bert Lahr whose eyes are close together and easily crossed, who emits apelike noises and resorts to other equally obvious antics. His most successful gag is a vulgar parody of a procedure common to all medical examinations. A great many people find him very funny. His function in the plot is to act as foil for a fat girl who wants to marry him. The fat girl, who looks as though she could barely waddle, does what fat girls must do to stay on the stage--springs a surprise, in this case a tap dance extremely agile (for a fat girl).

Oscar Shaw suavely appears as an aviator who wins a transcontinental air race and the hand of a delectable blonde heroine with an excellent voice (Grace Brinkley). The inveterate Tin Pan Alley trio of De Sylva, Brown & Henderson contribute one song ("Thank Your Father") which is likely to be favored. Joseph Urban has designed several salons which are totally unlike those at any airport in the country.

Launcelot and Elaine. In 1921 the noble, moody and self-incriminating Launcelot walked on a Greenwich Village stage with the lily maid of Astolat in a dramatic version of Tennyson's poetry by Playwright Edwin Milton Royle. It was a play to which school teachers were recommended to send their charges. It remains so; is enunciated, in the present revival, with true stock-company grandiloquence.

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