New Play in Manhattan

Keep Moving (words & music by Jack Scholl & Max Rich; White Horse Tavern Productions, Inc.) is historic but not impressive. It is the first presentation of the 1934-35 theatre season.

It takes about the same amount of time (two months or more) and money ($25,000 or more) to produce a good revue as it does a bad one. What distinguishes the successes from the failures is the x quantity of taste and talent. On that score the producers of Keep Moving had bad luck.* Beginning with a hopeless burlesque of Gertrude Stein's Four Saints in Three Acts, the show proceeds through a series of wooden dance numbers, ineptly written skits, patently derivative tunes. Then there are the Singer's Midgets, awkward little people with piping voices and thick Germanic accents who are employed as courtiers, adagio dancers, Mickey & Minnie Mouse and scores of Three Little Pigs. The problem of what could be done with midgets in the theatre has long bemused Broadway. Keep Moving has not solved it, but droll, dust-dry Comedian Tom Howard has in one skit. The midget, dressed as a child in a blue "sleeper," comes onstage demanding to be told a bedtime story. Irascible Mr. Howard refuses to treat the midget as a child, tartly tells him he is old enough to be his father, contemptuously asks him when he is going to take out his first papers, offers him a cigar. The bedtime story, a fairly dirty one about a Round Table boudoir, is pantomimed by a voluptuous young woman in medieval dress and an actor who cannot get out of his armor. About the only thing the midget has to do is ogle the girl and shout, when her knight enters with a fanfare: "TIME marches on!"

Along with Mr. Howard on the credit side of Keep Moving's ledger is a vulgar man named Clyde Hager. Right out of Gasoline Bill Baker's "Pipes from Pitch men" department in The Billboard, Mr. Hager, clutching suitcase and stand, scuttles back & forth across the stage pursued by a policeman until late in Act I. Then, setting up his tripes and keister, he proceeds to vend his patent potato peeler. It is all very authentic, with many protestations that his company is really giving away its product for advertising purposes and is willing to throw in a bar of Arabian perfumed soap.

Bulk of the torch singing in the show is supplied by Joan Abbott, a pneumatic, wild-haired blonde with a cannonball delivery. She reaches her lyric zenith with a number called "Mother Eve" which seems to have Adam's wife confused with her competitor Lilith. More suitable for whistling: "Sleepy Moon."

As the 1934-35 season began, five shows of the 1933-34 season were still running on Broadway. Veterans of the torrid doldrums, two were smut shows for summer visitors (Are You Decent? Sailor, Beware!), one was an uproarious comedy (She Loves Me Not), one was a revue (As Thousands Cheer), one was a local color drama (Tobacco Road).

*White Horse Tavern Productions, Inc. has nothing to do with Sportsman Pilot Felix William ("Bill") Zelcer, proprietor of Manhattan's White Horse Tavern, husband of onetime Actress Bonnie Glass.

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