days Mr Ziegfeld has provided. My own memories do not go back to the
actual productions in which Anna Held figured; I recall only the
virtuous indignation of elderly people and my own mixed feelings of
curiosity and disgust when I overheard reports of the goings-on.
But from the time I begin to remember them until to-day there has
always been a peculiar quality of pleasure in the Ziegfeld shows, and
the uninterrupted supply of things pleasant to see and entertaining
to hear, has been admirable. Mr Ziegfeld has never been actually
courageous; his novelties are never more audacious than, say, radiolite
costumes or an Urban backdrop. He is apparently pledged to the tedious
set-pieces which are supposed to be artistic--the Ben Ali Haggin
effects, the Fan in Many Lands or the ballot of A Night in Statuary
Hall with the discobolus coming to life and the arms of the Venus
de Milo miraculously restored. There are years, too, in which Mr
Ziegfeld, discovering new talent, follows but one vein and leaves his
shows so much in one tone that a slight depression sets in. Mr Edmund
Wilson, in the _Dial_ repeats the plaint of Mr Heywood Broun in the
_World_--that the Follies are frigid--the girls are all straight, the
ballet becomes a drill, the very laughs are organized and mechanical.
Well, it happens to be the function of the Ziegfeld Follies to be
Apollonic, not Dionysian; the leap and the cry of the bacchanale give
way to the song and dance, and when we want the true frenzy we have to
go elsewhere. I doubt whether even the success of the negro shows will
frighten Ziegfeld into mingling with his other elements some that will
be riotous and wild; the best they can do will be to prevent Ziegfeld
from growing too utterly “refined.” He tends at this moment to quiet
fun of the Lardner type and the occasional horseplay with which he
accentuates this murmur, this smile, is usually unsuccessful. I am,
myself, more moved by broader strokes than his, but I recognize that
Ziegfeld, and not the producers of _Shuffle Along_, is in the main
current of our development--that we tend to a mechanically perfect
society in which we will either master the machine or be enslaved by
it. And the only way to master it--since we cannot escape--will be by
understanding it in every detail. That is exactly Mr Ziegfeld’s present
preoccupation. I dissent, however, from the suggestion that the
physical loveliness of the Ziegfeld chorus has ceased to be seductive.
Some, as Mr Lardner once said--some like ’em cold, and there are at
least five other choruses which affect me as pleasurably. But for
those that like the Ziegfeld-type chorus, which has always a deal of
stateliness and a haughty air of being damned well bred, Mr Ziegfeld’s
production of the wares is perfect. He has simply moved his chorus one
step backward in order to make them appear slightly inaccessible and
so a little more desirable. His attack is indirect, but it is no less
certain.
In the back of the mind there always remains the idea that a revue
ought to be a revue of something, and as far as I know, George M. Cohan
is the last of those who have tried to accomplish that. Weber and
Fields presented burlesque; Mr Cohan’s efforts are not lost in that
dim perspective, and they seem superior, for he wove his amazingly
expert parodies of current successes into a new creation, a veritable
review. The high spirits and sophistication of the Cohan revues have
not frequently been equalled on our stage, for the whole of Cohan’s
talents were poured into them without reserve. The parodies and satire
were merciless and spared not even himself; for he took the old jibe
about his Yankee-Doodleism and wrote apropos of a show of his which
had failed: “Go, get a Flag, For you need it, you need it, you know
you need it!” He took off _Common Clay_ in swift and expert patter;
he destroyed the “song hit” with _Down by the Erie_ ten years earlier
and ten times better than the Forty-niners did; he advertised himself
and ridiculed his own self-advertisement; he was the principal actor
and he played fair with Willie Collier and Charles Winninger and Louise
Dresser. Throughout he was the high point of Cohanism, of that shrewd,
cock-sure, arrogant, wise, and witty man who was the true expression of
the America of Remember the Maine!, the McKinley elections, the Yellow
Kid, and _Coon! Coon! Coon!_ He was always smart, always versatile. To
this day he is smart enough to produce _Mary_ and _Little Nelly Kelly_,
knowing that the old stuff goes biggest and that even in the midst of
his own sophistication he can capture vaster audiences with his own
simplicity. This is an abdication of his proper function, to be sure.
The man who had so much to do with the great-American-drama (I allude
to _Seven Keys to Baldpate_ and the description “great-American” is
deliberate) and who could take any trash (_A Prince There Was_) and
make it go, through the indefatigable energy and the cleverness of
his own acting, and who could fight the world with his preposterous
_Tavern_--this man had no right to give up doing what he did so well.
I care nothing for the famous nasalities of George M. Cohan; after
the Four Cohans I saw him first as actor, so I do not mourn for his
dancing days. But I know that with only a fraction of Berlin’s gifts
as a composer, he had something which even Berlin lacks: the complete
sense of the boards. His revues would have been desirable additions to
each theatrical season if they had done no more than produce himself.
His hard sense, his unimaginative but not unsympathetic response to
everything that took place on the street and at the bar and on the
stage made him a prince of reviewers--he was not without malice and
he was wholly without philosophy. Perhaps that is why his revues
were wonderfully gay. Why they ever stopped I cannot tell; when they
stopped, strangely enough, they left the field to the Winter Garden. I
make no claim that the revues at this house are always pleasing; people
apparently still exist who are enthusiasts for Valeska Surratt. But I
do claim that they are always revues, even if they are sometimes to be
weighed by avoirdupois and not by critical standard.
[Illustration:
(_Courtesy of A. and C. Boni_)
GEORGE M. COHAN. By Alfred Frueh
]
The annihilation of all the vast and silly posturing which went on
a few years ago under the name of _The Jest_ was accomplished in a
perfect burlesque by Blanche Ring and Charles Winninger (the latter
played Leo Ditrichstein in one of the Cohan revues) and if _The Sheik_
never reached the stage it is possibly because Eddie Cantor burlesqued
it in advance on a bicycle and with a time clock for the women of the
harem. What has held the Winter Garden down (except, of course, when Al
Jolson there inhabited) is the lack of good music; for the humour has
always been broad and the slap-stick merry. The shows there always seem
to be hankering a little for the additional vulgarity of out-and-out
burlesque, but the Rath Brothers were as much at home there as the
Avon Comedy Four; if my head were at stake I could not recall a single
thing there which could be called exquisite, but I swear that as the
show girls shuffled precariously up and down the runway I did at times
fancy I heard the stamping of a goatish foot behind the scenes, and if
I didn’t like the sound, I was in the minority. The Winter Garden has
always been, in part, a direct assault on the senses and the method of
art is always indirect; Mr Ziegfeld knows this and always manages to
bathe his scenes in a cool virginal light, to the intensification of
pleasure for the connoisseurs.
The difference between these two shows can be measured by watching one
figure pass across the stage of each. Last year at the Winter Garden
Conchita Piquer sang a _malagueña_. (You can discover all you need to
know about the _malagueña_ in Mr Santayana’s Soliloquies; to us it is
the perfect exotic, as strange to our ears as Chinese song--stranger
because it remains recognizably Occidental, yet seems to be based on
no intervals known to our scales, and its rhythm is capricious and
uncertain). She sang it “wildly well,” with a pert assured air of
superiority. Yet she cast flowers into the audience as she did so, and
the background and the massing of the chorus behind her were all out of
key and prevented the song from being what at the Ziegfeld Follies it
inevitably must have been, exquisite.
At the Follies passes Gilda Grey, a performer of limited talents
gifted with unutterable intensity. Against a flaring background in
which all the signs of all of Broadway are crowded together, she sings
a commentary on the negro invasion--_It’s Getting Very Dark on Old
Broadway_--the scene fades and radiolite picks out the white dresses
of the chorus, the hands and faces recede into undistinguishable
black. And while the chorus sings Miss Grey’s voice rises in a deep
and shuddering ecstasy to cry out the two words, “Getting darker!” To
disengage that cry, to insure its repercussion, went all the skill of
production in everything that preceded and in everything that followed.
It was exciting, but it was also exquisite, and that is exactly what
the Winter Garden could not have done.
Neither of the two Music Box revues has reached that height, because
in neither has production kept pace with Berlin’s music. It is part
of the technique of the revue to have “stunts” and Berlin, being
_capable du tout_, last year set a dining menu to music. Yet nothing
was added when lobster and mayonnaise and celery appeared in the flesh;
even worse, this year something precious is lost when one of Berlin’s
veritable masterpieces, _Pack Up Your Sins and Go to the Devil_, is
produced with an endless number of trapdoors and hoists and all the
other mechanics of the stage. The first of the two revues flourished on
humour--Willie Collier and Sam Bernard were inexpressibly funny--and
on Berlin’s _Say It With Music_; so long as it stayed in New York the
appearance in person of Mr Berlin, explaining to the well-remembered
tunes how he wrote each of his masterpieces of ragtime, added much.
The tone of this revue was the tone of the building itself--varying
from the cool and well-proportioned exterior to the comfortable, a
little lavish interior. Florence Moore was as outrageous as ever, and
at least as active; she is the most tireless person on the stage and to
me the most tiring, for her vitality affects me as a cyclone in which I
am quite unnecessarily involved. All the more surprising, then, was her
shift from horseplay to burlesque in the house-hunting scene with Sam
Bernard, at the end of which the children were shot by their despairing
parents to remove the one obstacle between them and the perfect
apartment. In an earlier scene Collier had had his chance--the one in
which Bernard tried to explain his difficulties and to read a letter.
All of Bernard’s stutterings and flounderings in the English vocabulary
availed nothing against Collier’s imperturbable indifference.
Collier has always had a divine spark--it was visible even in _The
Hottentot_--and in that scene it glowed beautifully. The show was,
to be sure, held in the matrix of Berlin’s score, and was as much held
_down_ as up to that level--I mean it was not spoiled by the intrusion
of alien theatrical elements. Since then a new hydraulic system has
apparently been added to the equipment of the stage, and Hassard Short,
confusing the dynamics of the theatre with mere hoisting power, moves
everything that can be moved except the audience. The elements are all
there, but they are produced as if it were a benefit, not a revue.
[Illustration:
(_Courtesy of A. and C. Boni_)
WILLIE COLLIER. By Alfred Frueh]
John Murray Anderson’s is the hardest case to be sure about. A year
ago he “struck a new note in revues”--by producing one without a
scintilla of interest in any of its proceedings. Nothing quite so
lackadaisical and dull has ever had such a success. Yet he had long
before established a repute for being artistic--and, as far as I can
judge, it was by the exploitation of millions of yards of draperies in
place of the usual canvas scenery. It was a sound notion, and in the
first of these productions, _What’s in a Name?_ there was a pretty air
of the semi-professional, a challenging suggestion of improvisation, as
if the chorus and principals weren’t sure from moment to moment what
the _régisseur_ might suggest for them to do next.
He has always presented some of the loveliest and some of the ugliest
costumes in New York; and now that draperies are no longer his only
resource, he falls back upon transformations in scenery, or makes a
painted backdrop of the Moonlight Sonata come to life, with music, to
the astonishment of the multitude.
In short, it would appear that Mr Anderson is introducing into the
revue precisely that element of artistic bunk which has long been the
property of the bogus arts. I resent it, and resent it the more because
he doesn’t need it. In his recent show there were elements beyond
words to praise; the singing of Yvonne George was superb and superbly
arranged; the Widow Brown song, sung and _danced_ by Bert Savoy, had a
quality of tenderness which all the sentimental songs in the Ziegfeld
Follies try vainly to transmit; the two little tumblers, Fortunello and
Cirillino, are by name and manner of the _commedia dell’arte_ and John
Hazzard’s song about Alaska, with slides by Walter Hoban, is the stuff
that Forty-niners are made of.
It was in this show that the Herriman-Carpenter ballet of Krazy Kat was
tried and dismissed, and the fault here is the fault of Mr Anderson
throughout. Again it was attempted with an artistic dancer, when
everyone who has intelligence of Krazy knows that it should be done by
an American stunt dancer until the time when Mr Chaplin finds time to
do it. Krazy Kat is exquisite and funny--and whether Mr Carpenter lets
him remain so or not, it is clear that Mr Anderson wanted him to be
artistic at all cost. So with his whole production; he has sacrificed
fun all the way down the line; one is pleased, much more than amused,
and the gigantic revelry, the broad levity of Bert Savoy stand apart
from the show like a stranger. It is the one revue in which the mass
dancing entirely fails to remain in the memory, and I am convinced
that if Miss Brice hadn’t, in the Ziegfeld Follies, made _Mon Homme_ a
popular hit, Miss George’s far more fiery and varied and more generally
interesting rendition of it would leave it cold in the ears of the
audiences. For Mr Anderson has so far learned only to put over separate
things, and until you put the whole thing over the individual things
gain but half their victories.
That completes the circle to Mr Ziegfeld, and, since it is a question
of putting it over, associates with him another man who on at least
one occasion has done as well, Mr Charles Dillingham. If you omit the
one man shows as practised by Ed Wynn, Frank Tinney and Al Jolson, and
the nondescripts of Hitchcock, and pass over _Stop! Look! Listen!_ as
varying too far from the revue type, there remains _Watch Your Step_ as
another high spot in production, with the dancing of the Castles, the
humours of that very great comedian, Harry Kelly, and of Tinney, the
scenery and costumes by Robert McQuinn and Helen Dryden, and the whole
story of contemporary dancing in Mr Berlin’s music. Except for Harry
Kelly, every item was bettered in _Stop! Look! Listen!_, but in spite
of the presence of Gaby Deslys, it was not a revue--whereas _Watch
Your Step_ almost consciously set out to proclaim itself superior in
fineness and slickness to the Follies and almost succeeded.
I am trying to sketch the main _types_ of revue, not to write a history
of the revue; it is to be hoped that some one sufficiently sentimental
can be found to do the job. Whether in a history the drunken scene of
Leon Errol in the subway would figure largely, I do not know; I am not
even sure that the scene in the Grand Central while it was building,
with Bert Williams as the porter, would be noted; quite possibly the
memory of Lillian Lorraine on the swings--to me merely a bearable
necessity--and Frank Carter singing, (1918) _I’m Going to Pin My
Medal on the Girl I Left Behind_, will seem more important than Ina
Claire’s mimicry of Frances Starr’s _Marie-Odile_. It is possible that
the injection of real humour, like Lardner’s, may make the set scenes
like Laceland or the History of Shoes through the Ages or Our Colleges
more and more dispensable. I do not know. I feel fairly certain only
of this: that the relative importance of the workers in the field is
measured by their mastery of the art of production far more than by
their skill in picking individuals and stunts. I am also convinced that
those who have arrived at this perfection in an effort to give America
pleasure have done more for us than those who haven’t got half way in
trying to give us art.
_The Darktown Strutters
on Broadway_
THE DARKTOWN STRUTTERS ON BROADWAY
Anyone so minded can write an entirely false history of American
civilization by setting down in parallel columns the vogues and rages
which have overtaken us and Europe at the same time. The highly
patriotic, but a bit undergraduate, habit of slanging your own
country is always more effective if the facts about any other country
are a little obscure, and, thanks to the cable and the efficacy of
transatlantic mails, we now know virtually everything that isn’t so,
and virtually nothing that is important, about Europe. So it is quite
possible for a critic to say that in literature the taste of Europe is
far beyond ours, on the ground that Harold Bell Wright is the typical
American author and Conrad and Anatole France and Tolstoi the typical
European. I mean that this is possible if a critic has never heard of
the work of Nat Gould and William Le Queux in England, for instance.
The latest of these false parallels would be this: that while Europe
was going in for the primitive sculpture of the African negro, America
devoted itself and its theatres to musical shows composed and produced
by the nonprimitive negroes of Harlem, New York.[13] The wail of the
saxophone in _Shuffle Along_ had not yet died in my ears when a
Serious Critic made moan in his journal that the authors of that piece
were truckling to the white man’s sense of superiority by exhibiting
their own flesh and blood as a pack of cheats and scoundrels. What
had impressed me as a fairly awkward mechanism for introducing songs
and dances was by him taken as a libel on a race; and forgetting the
picaresque romance from the _Odyssey_ to _Get-Rich-Quick-Wallingford_,
forgetting that all peoples seem to take an abundant pleasure
in exposing themselves as delightful rogues, he wept over this
degradation. At about that time Mr Clive Bell, marking a reaction from
the extreme vogue of African plastic, still ranked the sculptures
produced by savage and semicivilized negroes as only a little below
those of the two or three great periods of artistic production. Again
it would seem that Europe had, in its effete way, stolen a march on us.
In effect the coloured shows were entertaining and interesting to
think about, whether they were good or bad, and most of them were
pretty bad. As shows, that is. As shows in a country which really knows
how to produce soul-satisfying eye-and-ear entertainment. They had
certain attractive qualities, and if they were in essence second rate,
they were at least dynamic, while the first-rate thing in Europe was
static. While Europe remained calm after the war we, hysterically, went
in for an enormous increase of pace in the active arts of the theatre.
I do not know whether we are altogether the losers, and leave the
question to others. I do know that for a moment these pieces seem to
have overshadowed our (can I say?) native revues.
Of course, in America no one cares for revues except the unenlightened
millions who pay to see them, so there is no one to rise and make
lamentation over this state of affairs. For years we have laboured to
perfect our revues--and the shuffling feet of a barbarian summon up
an evil djinn to banish them. The serene smoothness of manœuvre which
Mr Wayburn prepares for Mr Ziegfeld shrinks from the boards before
the haphazard leaping of unstudied numbers; the sweet gravity of the
dancers is forgotten for the barbarous rhythm of any half dozen darkies
with a sense of syncopation innate in them. Lavishness from Joseph
Urban precariously maintains itself against the smudged backdrop and
the overall; and over the prostrate and flowerlike and seductive
beauty of the chorus-girl, there steps and struts, magnificently
struts, the high-yaller!
The comparatively sober truth is that the negro cabaret in the theatre
is only a diversion, a necessary and healthful variation from our norm.
It has qualities seldom exquisite and always arresting; and these
qualities, having slowly vanished from the revue, have found themselves
again in burlesque and in these exotics. And I think it highly probable
that their only lasting effect will be to restore certain highly
desirable things to revue and musical comedy. If there is any doubt of
their goodness, another contrast will prove the point.
The one claim never made for the negro shows is that they are
artistic. Set beside them, then, a professedly artistic revue, the
_Pinwheel_, compounded of native and exotic effects. It had two or
three interesting or exciting numbers; but the whole effect was one
of dreariness. The pall of art was upon it; it died nightly. And
_Shuffle Along_, without art, but with tremendous vitality, not only
lived through the night, but dragged provincial New Yorkers to a
midnight show as well. Facing the other way, one beholds a straight
fake, the untimely efforts of Messrs McIntyre and Heath, who served
only to remind us that in time since overpast the real nigger show, as
practised by Williams and Walker, existed, and that what we are seeing
now is actually a continuation thereof, brought down from Harlem to
Broadway.
Now it was fairly obvious that _Shuffle Along_ had been conceived as
an entertainment for negroes; that is why it remained solid when it
took Broadway, to the intense surprise of its producers. It was, in
short, an exotic for us, but it wasn’t an exotic for themselves. Its
honesty was its success, and its honesty put a certain stamp upon its
successors. In all of them there is visible a regrettable tendency to
imitate, at moments, the worst features of our usual musical comedy.
But the major portion of each show is native, and so good.
They have all of them an appearance of unpremeditated violence which
distinguishes them from the calculated and beautiful effects of Mr
Ziegfeld or Mr John Murray Anderson. It goes much beyond the celebrated
(and by this time faked) appearance of “enjoying themselves.” They
may never forgive me for it, but I really do not care whether the
actors and actresses who amuse me are having a good time themselves.
The theatre, for them, is a place for _producing_, not for _enjoying_
sensations and effects; so the one thing I wish them is that when
they are good they may have the purely moral pleasure of being good.
It is the method that counts, and in the negro shows the method has
been always the maximum pressure in song and dance, and the minimum of
subtlety in the conversations and patter songs. The exceptions are not
notable.
The songs and dances must be scored _fff_, a _stretto_, and after that
those diverging lines which indicate _crescendo_; the lines of violence
never again approach each other in these numbers, and one has to wait
for the appearance of a fairly silly sentimental song for a moment of
quiet. The strange people who direct these shows and the responsive
animals who sing and dance have with some success controverted the
notion that it is in contrasts that the intelligent man has his
greatest pleasure. One feels that the show is a continuous wild cry and
an uninterrupted joyous rage, that the _élan vital_ is inexhaustible
and unbridled and enormously good.
The most skilful individual player has been Florence Mills; merely to
watch her walk out upon the stage, with her long, free stride and her
superb, shameless swing, is an æsthetic pleasure; she is a school and
exemplar of carriage and deportment; two other actors I have seen so
take a stage; Cohan by stage instinct, Marie Tempest by a cultivated
genius. Florence Mills is almost the definition of the romantic “_une
force qui va_,” but she remains an original, with little or nothing
to give beyond her presence, her instinctive grace, and her baffling,
seductive voice. Without that endowment, a small one in comparison
with, say, Gilda Grey’s, almost all the others give nothing but energy,
and the trouble there is that if you have nothing but energy to give,
you must give more than you can afford. The wild cry is a little too
piercing at times, the postures and the pattings and the leapings
all a little beyond the necessary measure. It remains simple; but
simplicity, even if it isn’t usually vulgar, can be a bit rough.