Part 10

Each of the Princess shows had a reasonable, but not serious, plot. The advantage of a plot isn’t, as one often hears, that it gives the appearance of reality to the piece, for who should expect that? There is no reason why a musical comedy should not be wholly preposterous, dramatically or psychologically, provided, like _Iolanthe_, it has a logic of its own. No. The advantage is that when there is a definitely perceptible structure everything else arrives with greater intensity of effect. The best of the Princess shows had the weakest plot, for _Leave It to Jane_ was based on Ade’s _College Widow_, which has no great quality. Since songs and dances had to take up much time, this plot was gratifyingly reduced to a few essential lines and played without sentiment. The result was a rush of action in which everything found place. The later pieces were on librettos by Guy Bolton, suggesting French farces, and full of neat arrangements. None of them was stupid. They all gave place for Mr Wodehouse’s exceptional talents as a lyric-writer. He is as an English humorist superior to most, and as a master of complicated, original, amusing rhymes is the best man in the business. A special quality of making fun is discernible in all his lyrics, and he does good parodies, like _When It’s Nesting Time in Flatbush_. The Princess type made rather a fetish of simplicity (I quote from memory):

Although the thing that’s smart is To stay out all night on parties, I’ll be sitting, with my knitting, In the good old-fashioned way,

and of sentiment:

The breeze in the trees brings a scent of orange blossoms And the skies turn soft and blue, When there’s no one around except the girl you love And the girl you love loves you,

which was often not amorous and rose to as fine a thing as _The Siren Song_:

Come to us, we’ve waited so long for you, Every day we make a new song for you; Come, come, to us, we love you so. Leave behind the world and its fretting And we will give you rest and forgetting, So sang the sirens ages and ages ago.

There was also patter as in the Cleopatra song:

And when she tired, as girls will do, Of Bill or Jack or Jim, The time had come, his friends all knew, To say good-by to him. She would not stand by any means Regretful, stormy, farewell scenes, To such low stuff she would not stoop So she just put poison in the soup.

When out with Cleopatterer Men always made their wills; They knew they had no time to waste. When the gumbo had that funny taste They’d take her hand and squeeze it And murmur, “Oh, you kid!” But they none of ’em liked to start to feed Till Cleopatterer did.

and in each of these types Wodehouse was faultless.

Fortunately for him and for us these songs were set to a music which in addition to being delightful let the words appear, and occasionally was so fluent, so inevitable, that it made the words seem even simpler and more conversational than they are. Jerome Kern composed nearly all of the Princess shows and the collected scores are impressive. He is the most erudite of our simple composers and he manipulates material with inordinate skill. He can adapt German folksong (_Freut euch das Leben_ underlies _Phoebe Snow_); he didn’t do so well by _Kingdom Comin’_, which was botched and cut; he also understands Sullivan. But his best work, _The Siren Song_, _The Little Ships_, _The Sun Shines Brighter_, have a melodious line, a structure, and a general tidiness of execution which are all their own. _The Siren Song_ corresponds exactly to the Viennese waltz, but both the words and the music are impersonal; they are a gentle hymn to seduction, with humour. Scattered between languorous rhythms are bursts of gaiety, like a handful of pebbles thrown against a window--which doesn’t open--for the song ends in a tender melancholy. It is a real achievement. Compare the lines I have quoted above with “Come, come, I love you only,” from _The Chocolate Soldier_--phrases you would expect to arrive at the same musical conclusion. The crash of “_Oh, Hero Mine!_” in the second is good drama, saved from being too obvious by being sung to the coward Sergius and not to the protagonist Bluntschli. But in comparison the gentle ending of _The Siren Song_ is, as song, superior: “So sang the Sirens, ages and ages ago”--and you take it or leave it. The music, at least, is not forcing your hand.

The Princess shows never had any great stars; instead, they had the one quality which always makes for success--_esprit de corps_. In each the company was aware of the nature and quality of the piece it was playing, and it worked in variations of that genial and sophisticated atmosphere. It was simply against the tone of the Princess shows to be dull; and I, who like nearly all musical shows, found in them my greatest delight.

They passed into something else because they were exquisitely proportioned on a small scale--the scale, by the way of _The Beggar’s Opera_, which they resembled--and the whole tendency of the time was toward elaboration. They involved small choruses, little eccentric dancing, and required no humorist _hors de texte_. I count it a triumph for Mr Dillingham, as well as for the others concerned, that they have been able to preserve so much of the Princess in some of the Globe productions. The best of these, I think, is _Good-morning, Dearie_. It has an adequate plot; it has room for Harland Dixon, a fine dancer; for Ada Lewis, an expert broad comedienne; for Maurice and his partner, whose name I don’t remember; for a large dancing chorus and for stunts; better still it did little to hinder Jerome Kern. It was here that he took the most famous of waltzes and implicated it masterfully in a blues; and here that all the seductiveness and gaiety of the Princess music returned with _Ka-lu-a_ and _Didn’t You Believe?_ There were a few faults in the production; the _décor_ lacked freshness, although it didn’t actually offend; the Chinese scene was hackneyed. But on the whole it is the best musical comedy I have seen since the Princess shows.

What forced us to be elaborate was not the memory of the Viennese type, but the growing complexity of revue, always cutting into musical comedy. It should be noted that _Around the Map_ (which I hold the best musical comedy--not operetta--I saw before the Princess shows) first brought Joseph Urban into the field, taking him from the Boston Opera House and pushing him on the way to Ziegfeld, where he was tardily recognized by the Metropolitan for whom he has made _Oberon!_ _Around the Map_ had some twenty scenes, it dealt with a trip around the world in search of safety socks, and was all gay (with Else Alder), all good music (Caryll) and only the beginning of elaboration. But Mr Berlin’s two shows and a host of others indicated that to survive musical comedy would have to appear lavish. Comparatively simple shows still occur--_Tangerine_ was one; but we seem to be in for something fairly elaborate--in music as in the Le-Baron-Kreisler pieces, in _décor_ as in the Shubert-Century productions, in stars and stunts as in Dillingham’s.

I do not pretend to cover the ground, and to name the names, in this sketch; not even to characterize all the types. I don’t know what to say about _Mary_, in which George M. Cohan worked a chorus into a state of frantic energy and Louis Hirsch provided _The Love Nest;_ nor of twenty other individual successes. One composer remains whose work is often so good, whose case is so illuminating, that he must be considered. That is Victor Herbert. It should be said at once that even long after his early successes he composed a fine musical comedy, _The Only Girl_. The difficulty about Mr Herbert is that he has succumbed to the American habit of thinking that grand opera is great opera. I have heard him at one of his _premières_ speaking from the conductor’s dais to assure the audience that the present piece was in the high line of operetta, that more pieces like it would put an end to the vulgarity of musical shows. The regrettable fact was that _The Madcap Duchess_ put an end to nothing but itself; I recall the name, that Ann Swinburne was in it, and that it had a good patter song; the rest was doleful. Whereas two weeks later in the same house I heard _The Lady of the Slipper_, in which Mr Herbert, setting out to write an ordinary simple musical show, was a thoroughly competent composer, full of ingenuity and interest and taste and invention. If he had only taken his eyes off the Metropolitan Opera House he would probably have been the best of the lot to-day. He suffers--although he is vastly respected--because he failed in respect to the fine art of the musical show.

The wonderful thing about that art is that it is made up of varied elements which are fused into something greater than themselves. There is a song and dance by Julia Sanderson, who is not a great artist; or the sudden apparition of a little man pursued in a harem, bounding upon a scarlet pouffe six feet in diameter and nuzzling like a dog--Jimmy Barton, in fact, who is one; and the rambling story told by Percival Knight in _The Quaker Girl_ or the drunken scene by Clifton Crawford in _The Peasant Girl_; there is _In the Night_, from _The Queen of the Movies_ or Johnny Dooley falling out of the clerk’s desk in _Listen, Lester_; there is Donald Brian, the perpetual _jeune premier_, or the amazing Spanish song in _Apple Blossoms_, or a setting designed by Norman-Bel Geddes or costumes by Helen Dryden or the _Sandman_ song from _The Dollar Princess_, or the entrance of the Bulgarians in _The Chocolate Soldier_ or the wickedly expert prosody of Brian Hooker. What is it takes all of these and composes them into something beautiful and entertaining? Skill in production is part of it, but not all, for the same elements: colour, light, sound, movement, can be combined into other forms which lack that particular air of urbanity, of well-being, of rich contentment and interest which is the special atmosphere of musical shows. I can only find a word and say that the secret resides in it--high spirits. For a musical comedy, even a sentimental one, must be high-spirited in execution--that was the lesson of an unsentimental one, _The Beggar’s Opera_; and at the same time there must be some courage, some defiance of nature and sound sense, a feeling for fantasy, which means that the life of the spirit is high, even when the life of the body is in chains. It is for this freedom of the spirit, released by music as always and diverted by all the other elements in them, that these shows are cherished. It is, naturally, as a counter-attack on solemnity that I am going to found my theatre.

_The One-Man Show_

THE ONE-MAN SHOW

When all the other grave æsthetic questions about the stage are answered, some profound theorist may explain the existence of the one-man show. Since I am not a materialist, I cannot concede the obvious solution--that a man finds enough money to produce himself in a Broadway show--because there is something attractive and mysterious about this type of entertainment which the explanation fails to explain.

The theory of the one-man show is apparently that there are individuals so endowed, so versatile, and so beloved, that no other vehicle will suffice to let them do their work. Conversely, that they are of such quality that _they_ suffice for the strange entertainment with which they are surrounded and that nothing else matters provided they are long and frequent on the stage. Six men and two women are in the first roster of the one-man show: Fred Stone, Ed Wynn, Raymond Hitchcock, Eddie Cantor, Frank Tinney, and Al Jolson; below them, leading the women, Elsie Janis and Nora Bayes. And omitting Jolson because he is so great that he cannot be put in any company, the greatest one-man show was one in which none of these appeared--it was one in which even the man himself didn’t appear. It was a show in which one man succeeded where all of these, this time not excluding Jolson, had failed: for he made the whole production _his kind_ of show--and the others have never quite managed to do more than make themselves.

The chief example of this failure is Hitchcock, whose series lapses ever so often, leaving him stranded on the bleak shore of a _Pin Wheel Revue_--an artistic, an intellectual, an incredibly stupid production which Hitchy manfully tried first to save and then to abandon. There were in the better Hitchy shows other first-rate people: one who masqueraded as Joseph Cook and was none other than Joe Cook the Humorist out of vaudeville and out of his element; Ray Dooley was with Hitchy, I believe, and there were always good dancers. Hitchy kept on the stage a long time, as _conférencier_ and as participant, and his amiable drollery was always at the same level--just enough. He never quite concealed the strain of making a production _go_; one always wanted to be much more amused, and Hitchy never got beyond the episode of the Captain of the Fire Brigade or trying to buy the middle two-cent stamp in a sheet of a hundred. A series of vaudeville sketches doesn’t make a one-man show, even if he plays in all of them; and the moment Hitchcock was off, _Hitchy-koo_ went to pieces, some good and some bad, and all trying a little too hard to be something else.

Eddie Cantor and Al Jolson appear in the two different Winter Garden types of show--the Jolson and the Winter Garden _in impuris naturalibus_. Jolson infuses something both gay and broad into his pieces; even the recurrence of Lawrence D’Orsay cannot win back the original Winter Garden atmosphere and even the disappearance of Kitty Doner cannot diminish Jolson’s private quality. Of the straight Winter Garden shows, the 1922 with Eddie Cantor was the best in ten years, made so by Cantor and made by him, in spite of the billing, into a one-man show. The nervous energy of Cantor isn’t sufficient to animate the active, but indifferent choruses of the Shuberts. One thing, however, he can do superbly--the lamb led to the slaughter. It is best when he chooses to play the timid, Ghetto-bred, pale-faced Jewish lad, seduced by glory or the prospects of pay into competing with athletes and bruisers. One thing he cannot do and should learn not to try--the black-face song and comedy of his master, Jolson. The scenes of violence vary; that of the osteopath was an exploitation of meaningless brutality; I cared for nothing after Eddie’s frightened entrance, “Are you the Ostermoor?” But the aviation examination and the application for the police force were excellent pieces of construction, holding sympathy all the way through and keeping on the safe side of nausea. Both of these were before the Winter Garden days and the Winter Garden exploit was better than either. He played here a cutter in a hand-me-down clothing store and it was his function to leap into the breach whenever a customer showed the slightest tendency to leave without buying a suit. The victim was obsessed by some idea of having “a belt in the back” and was forced into sailor suits and fancy costume and was generally made miserable. Eddie’s terrific rushes from the wings, his appeals to God to strike him dead “on the spot” if the suit now being tried on wasn’t the best suit in the world, his helplessness and his, “Well, kill me, so kill me,” as apology when his partner revealed the damning fact that that happened to be the man’s old suit--all of this was worth the whole of the Potash-Perlmutter cycle. And the whole-heartedness of Cantor’s violence--essentially the bullying of a coward who has at last discovered some one weaker than himself, was faultless. He sings well the slightly suggestive songs like _After the Ball_ (new version), and his three broken dance steps with the sawing motion of his gloved hands create an image exceedingly precise and palpable. There is in him just enough for the one-man show, but so far it has been limited by his tendency to imitate and by failure to develop his own sources of strength. Even in _Kid Boots_ he just fails to make the grade.

The one-man show _requires_ its leader to leave nothing in himself unexploited--there is too much for him to do and he must take everything on himself--the requirements are exactly opposite to those of the vaudeville act where the actor must work in the briefest compass, with the utmost concentration, and get his effects in the shortest time. Frank Tinney’s success in vaudeville marks the limitations of his success in his shows--for he imposed on vaudeville that languid easy-going manner of his and was just enough out of vaudeville tempo (he is very deceptive in this) to appear to be a novelty there. In essence he isn’t a good one-man, for his line is limited and his humour and his good-humour (in which he is matched only by Ed Wynn) are not capable of the strain of a long winter’s evening entertainment. Tinney was excellent in a quarrel scene with Bernard Granville (in a Ziegfeld _Follies_, I think) the two pacing in opposite directions, the width of the stage between them, always from footlights to backdrop and never crossing the stage; he was disputatious and entertaining on the negative of the proposition that the Erie railroad (pronounced for reasons of his own, Ee-righ) is a very expensive railroad; his appearance in _Watch Your Step_ was almost perfect. (Consult Mr A. Woollcott’s _Shouts and Murmurs_ for everything about Tinney; Mr Woollcott’s descriptions are accurate and evocative and he errs only in his estimate of Tinney’s quality.) Tinney has everything except the excess of vitality, the surcharge of genius. He has method nearly to perfection and it is a wholly original, ingratiating, and, up to a certain point, adaptable method. What he has done is to destroy the “good joke,” for all of Tinney’s jokes are bad ones and he gets his effect by fumbling about with them, by lengthening the preliminaries, by false starts, erasures, corrections--until his arrival at the point relieves the suspense. I have heard him take at least ten minutes to put over: “Lend me a dollar for a week, old man.--Who is the weak old man?” and not a moment was superfluous. He is expert at kidding the audience, and as he is never in character he never steps out. There isn’t quite enough of him, that is all.

There is enough of Fred Stone for versatility and not enough for specific personal appeal. As acrobat, dancer, ventriloquist, and cut-up Stone is easily in the lead; but the unnamable quality is lacking. See him climbing up an arbour to meet his Juliet in the balcony; he is discovered, hangs head downward in peril of his life, seizes a potted flower and with it begins to dust the vines--it is Chaplinesque in conception and beautifully executed. See him on the slack rope continually on the point of falling off and continually recovering and seeming to hang on by his boot toe; or in _The Lady of the Slipper_ making a beautiful series of leaps from chair to divan, from divan to table, to a triumphant exit through the unsuspected scenery; or in another quality recall the famous “Very good, Eddie,” of _Chin-Chin_. He is incredible; one wouldn’t miss him for worlds; yet it is always what he does and not himself that constitutes the attraction. I wonder whether I do not wrong him altogether by classing him with the one-men, for it was always something more than Montgomery and Stone in the days of _The Red Mill_ and Stone does not exaggerate himself on the stage. His command of attributes is greater than that of any other player; he does everything with a beautiful, errorless accuracy--and the pleasure of seeing things _exactly right_, all the time, is not to be underestimated.

It is Ed Wynn’s pleasure to make everything seem utterly haphazard. Wynn is a surd in the theatre--there is always something left unresolved in reducing him to the lowest term, and he is incommensurable because there are no standards for him and no similars. I prefer to see him wandering through a good revue, changing hats, worrying about a “rewolwer” in the first scene and stopping dead in the twentieth to declare that it wasn’t a “rewolwer” at all, but a pistol. When he came to put on a one-man show he preserved the best part of this incoherence. He made it his business to appear before a drop curtain and explain in an amazing vocabulary and with painstaking gravity exactly what was to occur in the next scene. He affects to be awkward (to quote him, I might go so far as to call him uncouth.... I think I _will_ call him uncouth.... He is uncouth); his gestures are florid and wide, his earnestness makes all things vivid. Each of these explanations involves a bad pun and none, of course, has anything to do with the scene that actually follows. Like Jolson and Cantor, he takes the stage at a given moment and entertains. His famous inventions seemed to be the crudest form of humour--a typewriter carriage for eating corn on the cob, a burning candle to set in one’s ears in order to wake up in time--yet sheer ebullition carried them high into the field of “nice, clean fun.” Wynn’s words come tumbling out of him, agglutinated, chaotic, disorderly; he is abashed by his own occasional temerity, he is timid and covers it with brashness--and all of this is a carefully created personage; it is _not_ Ed Wynn. He has found a little odd corner of life which no one else cultivates; it is a sort of rusticity in the face of _simple_ things; he is a perpetual immigrant obsessed by hats and shoes and words and small ideas, instead of bothering about skyscrapers. The deepness of his zanylike appreciation of every-day things is the secret of his capacity for making them startling and funny. His one fault is the show with which he surrounds himself.