STAGELAND

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 608, 9 March 1929, Page 24

STAGELAND

FIXTURES

HIS MAJESTY'S THEATRE Now Playing: Allan Wilkie's Shakespearian Company in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” COMING "The Midnight Frolics,” Kdgeley and Dawe. “The Desert Song.” "The Patsy.” ST. JAMES THEATRE Now Playing George Wallace Revue Company, “When Knights Were Bold.” COMING “Baby Cyclone” and “Good News,’ Elsie Prince and Jimmy Godden. “Rio Rita,” Gladys Moncrieff. CONCERT CHAMBER April: “The Bird in Hand,” Auckland Little Theatre Society. Appearing in England just now is Alexander Zass (“The World’s Strongest Man”), who carries ahorse and cart round the stage, and then — suspended by one leg from a rope—holds by his teeth a. piano, with the added weight of a woman that is playing it. Minnie Love and Jennie Hartley, both still remembered in Australia, and New Zealand, were principal boys in rival pantomimes at Bristol (England) at Christmas time —the former in “Cinderella,” and the latter in “Hop o’ My Thumb.” Teddie Gerard, one of the brightest stars ever seen in revue in London, was married recently to Captain Archie Grant, of the Scots Guards. Miss Gerard met Captain Grant years ago when the latter was at Harrow, and when she herself was playing in one of her earliest London revues, “Bric-a-Brac,” at the Palace Theatre. Recently in London at the Gallery First-nighters’ Club, Noel PembertonBilling, whose play “flopped” badly, expressed himself as tired of critics, and suggested that some means might be contrived of registering the laughter and applause at a flust-night production. This record —in the form of a chart—could then be published in the papers. “Thus wosild it be known,” he added, “what the public really thought about the rday.”

(By COTESRNUS.) THE IDEAL VOICE FOR SHAKESPEARE

Recent and current London productions contain tlie following players who have appeared in Australia or New Zealand, or both, with William-son-Tait, Ltd.:—“Plunder” (Tom Walls), “Many Waters” (Prank Harvey), “Passing Brompton Road” (Marie Tempest), “Show Boat” (Marie Burke), “Such Men are Dangerous” (Matheson Lang), “The Shadow” (Bert Coote), “The Truth Game” (Lilian Braith waite), “That’s a Good Girl” (Vera Pearce), “Mr Pickwick” f Ambrose Manning and May Chevalr), “A Hundred Years Ago” (Horace Hodges and Angela Baddeley), “Virginia” (George Gee), “Lucky Girl” (Gene Gerrard), “Calara Gibbings” (Violet Lorraine), and “To What Red Hell?” (Sara Allgood).

“Street Scene”

Elmer Rice's Play of New York Life

A REMARKABLE ACHIEVEMENT

Wliat many have desired Elmer Rice has achieved with amazing insight in his new* play entitled “Street Scene,” produced recently in New York. He has transferred intact to the stage a segment of representative New York life, preserving not only its appearance but its character, relating it not only to the city hut to humanity. Mr. Rice has not been animated by any external point of view, satiric or sociological, and be has not sacrificed truth to the expediency of theatre. On the contrary, as these middle-class New Yorkers pass up and down their untidy street about tbeir personal and neighbourly affairs you feel tbat every stroke in this vigorous lithograph is informed with complete understanding. Nothing in recent memory has been so big in the integrity of its interpretation, says an American critic. Whatever individuality the charaeters may have

melts into mon suffering of a torrid day in June. It begins the play casually by bringing the bulging Mrs. Florentino to to her first-floor window, forcing the grotesquely intellectual Abraham Kaplan to read his Elmer Rice Yiddish newspaper on the window sill, pulling the janitor and his wife from their airless basement to the sidewalk and keeping most of the wilted, fretful house dwellers on the front stoop, where they gossip and banter and once nearly come to blows. The meaningless comradeship that a hot day makes inevitable envelops the play. Although the cast includes fortyfive characters, in addition to innumerable passers-by, Mr. Rice does not sketch them in perfunctorily as local colour. Nothing in the play is so remarkable as his skill in catching nearly every significant trait of their common and individual character. In addition to being an observer and thinker, Mr. Rice is ! a man of the theatre. So intelligently has he cast and directed his play that the script seems more like the transcript of an impromptu performance than the initial substance of the play. Although some of the episodes smell of the theatre, “Street Scene,” as a whole, draws its vitality from the outside. As the background to the play, Jo Mielnizer has designed one of those illuminating settings that can never be dissociated from the performance, since they serve the play accurately in mood as well as fact. At first you are struck by the extraordinary resemblance of every detail in “Street Scene,” to a humdrum quarter of New York. Presently you realise that it is no clever imitation. It is the essence of New York.