New Plays in Manhattan

I Must Love Someone (by Jack Kirkland & Leyla Georgie; produced by Jack Kirkland) tells of six fly young ladies who, at the turn of the century, made up a Florodora Sextet.* In Act I, along with six swains, they render Tell Me, Pretty Maiden quite fetchingly; then for the rest of the show they gallivant with various admirers whose attentions go considerably beyond candy, books and flowers. One Pretty Maiden goes in for blackmail; another enjoys watching her aged suitor tumble down a flight of steps; a third is kept by a pal of the Mayor's; a fourth gets a venereal disease from her lover and shoots him.

It is the authors' fond hope, in portraying such girlish fun, "to capture the spirit of New York's glittering and legendary years." To their idyllic plot they have added an atmosphere as romantic as a pair of handcuffs, a sty's-the-limit vulgarity. To those who were not of theatre age in 1900, / Must Love Someone gives the impression that the Florodora Sextet included such glamor girls of the past as Red Light Annie, Chicago May and Lizzie Borden.

Mrs. O'Brien Entertains (by Harry Madden; produced by George Abbott) but she is not very entertaining. Snooting the century-ago Irish immigrants who fill her house, and sneering at all foreigners who are non-Irish, she is finally read a lecture on Americanism and the melting pot, quickly mends her ways. The play is well-meaning, noisy, false: the Maggie and Jiggs set transferred from comic strip to stage.

*During Florodora's original Manhattan run of 547 performances, at least 79 girls appeared at different times in the famed Sextet.

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