A Nightly Trip to Hades

Manawatu Times, Volume 64, Issue 114, 17 May 1939, Page 7

A Nightly Trip to Hades

The little New Yorker, Joanna Claire, who is the principal dancer with Chang’s Oriental revue, has travelled in many strange lands before finding New Zealand. Portugal, where you now find the only things faintly resembling the fabulous “castles in Spain,” and South America, where you give your show in Spanish, fall into lino with Europe, Asia, of course, good old U.S.A. where magic is concerned. Miss Claire looks surprisingly young both on and off stage to have had such wide experience. She has many friends in Hollywood, where she danced at an early age as a sort of child entertainer for tho film stars. Errol Flynn and Merle Oberon are two of her especial “buddies,” and she can give graphic descriptions of the .stars’ homes, with a special word for Joan Bennett’s swimming pool, with a floor that has the appearance of cut glas.% and makes tho bather feel that she’s diving into a bath of diamonds. Just before Joanna Claire joined the present company she danced for a three months’ season at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, where the seats cost as much as twenty and thirty American dollars, and where the footprints and handprints of famous stars of stage and screen are preserved forever in cement. In alt the exciting experiences this dancer was prepared to talk about there was one thing over which she drew a veil—she would give no hint whatsoever of how she fares in the thin air into which she repeatedly vanishes during her nightly trip to llades. Chang’s production of “A Trip to Hades” will bo presented at the Opera House, Palmerston North, next Monday and Tuesday. The box plan opens this morning at Collinson and Cunninghame’s.