“THE EYES OF YOUTH.”

New Zealand Illustrated Sporting & Dramatic Review, Issue 1540, 30 October 1919, Page 34

“THE EYES OF YOUTH.”

“The Eyes of Youth,” which will be the second production of the Emelie Polini season, is the story of a New York girl who has three more or less eligible suitors, and, in addition, a voice of peerless beauty, so an Italian opera manager tells her. This gentleman offers to provide for her two years’ free tuition, with the object of “starring” her as a prima donna. Hesitant as to which of the paths to take, she is impelled to give greater thought to the Italian’s proposal by the discovery that her father is financially embarrassed. Chance sends a poor Indian - pedlar to the house. The girl is kind to him, and in gratitude the Oriental promises her that he will afford her

three glimpses into the future, so that she may make up her mind as to which of her three admirers she will accept, or drop all three for a lucrative career in opera.’ This is to be accomplished through the medium of the crystal. What the girl sees the audience sees —three grave warnings. One vision reveals the girl as an ill-paid inefficient school teacher in her little home town; the next as a half-intoxicated and ’ querulous operatic star, who drinks, smokes, and swears, and is already — “shopsoiled”; and the third vision reveals her first as a victim of perjury in a divorce proceedings and next as a night lounger outside a fast ■ New York restaurant, a morphia maniac, “chivvied” by a detective with heart of gold, who would help her to a better way :of life. But, before he has time to get to work, the man in the first act, upon whom she would have flung her handkerchief, appears, rich, but true as steel, even though he has been inferentially rejected. Out of her crystal gazings and back into the mundane , atmosphere the girl returns with wide-seeing eyes, and very properly she gives her heart to the man she really loves, and who loves her. The play has a judicious blend of love, comedy and tragedy.