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.
[Illustration: FRANK TINNEY
By Roland Young]
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.
[Illustration: ED. WYNN
By Roland Young]
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.
I have never seen Elsie Janis better than she was in _The Lady of the
Slipper_--with the exception of Gaby Deslys I have never seen any woman
comparable to Miss Janis in that piece, and in it she had qualities
which ought to have made her appearance in an individual show a much
greater success than it actually turned out to be. For, except a
voice, Miss Janis has everything. She is a beautiful dancer and her
legs are handsomer than Mistinguett’s, and she is the finest mimic I
have ever seen on the stage, several shades ahead of Ina Claire. An
exceptional intelligence operates in the creation of these caricatures,
for they are all created by seizing upon vital characteristics of
tone, gesture, tempo of movement, spirit; and the arrangement of her
hair and the contortions of her face are only guide-signs to the
accomplished act. She is herself of an abounding grace, a suppleness
of body and of mind, and the measure of her skill is the exact degree
in which her grace and simplicity are transformed into harshness or
angularity or sophistication as she passes one after another of our
stage personalities before her mirror. This year I saw her in a Paris
music-hall take off Mistinguett and Max Dearly. She presented them
singing _Give Me Moonlight_ in their own imagined versions and her
throaty “Give me a gas light” for the creator of _Mon Homme_ was
superb. She offered to sing it, at the end, as she herself ought to
sing it--and danced it without uttering a sound. It reminded one of
Irene Castle in _Watch Your Step_. For an exact calculation of her
capacities and a sensible, modest intention to stay within them and
to exploit them to the limit are parts of Elsie Janis’s intelligence.
To be sure, it isn’t her intelligence--it is her loveliness and her
talent that endear her to us. But it is grateful, for once in a way,
to find a talent so great, a loveliness so irresistible, joined to an
intelligence which sets all in motion and spoils nothing.
I suspect that in spite of the best of the one-man shows there is
something wrong with the idea--perhaps because the environment requires
more than any man has yet been able to give. And the one perfect
example is, as I have suggested, proof of this. Because _Stop! Look!
Listen!_ which was only a moderate success on Broadway and involved
the talents of Gaby Deslys, Doyle and Dixon, Harry Fox, Tempest and
Sunshine, the beautiful Justine Johnston, Helen Barnes, Helen Dryden
as costumer and Robert McQuinn as scenic designer, a beautiful chorus
and an excellent producer, was actually the one-man show of Irving
Berlin. For once a complete and varied show expressed the spirit of one
man to perfection. In that piece, Berlin wrote two of his masterpieces
and about four other superb songs; and, more than that, suffused the
entire production with the gay spirit of his music. There occurred
_The Ragtime Melodrama_ danced by Doyle and Dixon--only the Common Clay
scene from the Cohan revue ever approached it, and Doyle and Dixon
never danced better (unless, possibly, a quarter of an hour earlier
in _The Hula-Hula_); there was _The Girl on the Magazine Cover_,
perfectly set and costumed, a really good sentimental song with its
quaint introduction of _Lohengrin_ (not the _Wedding March_); there
was _When I Get Back to the U. S. A._ sung against a chorus of _My
Country, ’Tis of Thee_; there was Gaby’s wicked _Take Off a Little
Bit_ and Harry Fox’s _Press-Agent Song_--and finally the second of
Berlin’s three great tributes to his art: _I Love a Piano_, which,
like the mother of Louis Napoleon, he wrote for six pianos and in
which everything in syncopation up to that time was epitomized and
carried to a perfect conclusion. Whatever was gay, light, colourful,
whatever was accurate, assured, confident, and good-humoured, was in
this miraculous production. I saw it twelve times in two weeks--lured
partly, I must confess, by the hope that Harry Pilcer would break at
least a leg in his fall down the golden stairs. He never did; in spite
of which, seeing it again, months later, it still seemed to me the
apotheosis of pure show. I think I could reconstruct every moment of
it, including the useless plot and Justine Johnston’s ankles; it seems
a pity that all of it, the ephemeral and the permanent, should have
already passed from the stage. It was a beginning in ragtime operetta
which Mr Berlin has never followed up; his inexhaustible talents have
been diverted into other things; he is now a maker of revues. Yet when
he saw _The Beggar’s Opera_, Mr Berlin felt something plucking at his
sleeve, reminding him that it was his job, and his alone, to create the
comparable type for America.
At that moment he thought back to _Stop! Look! Listen!_--but he had
already begun to build the Music Box--and we must wait patiently for
what time will bring as a real successor to his one-man show. At any
rate, we have had it. We know, now, what it can amount to--and it is
enough. Enough, at any rate, to put the veritable one-man show fairly
definitely out of the running.
_The Dæmonic in the
American Theatre_
THE DÆMONIC IN THE AMERICAN THEATRE
One man on the American stage, and one woman, are possessed--Al
Jolson and Fanny Brice. Their dæmons are not of the same order, but
together they represent all we have of the Great God Pan, and we
ought to be grateful for it. For in addition to being more or less a
Christian country, America is a Protestant community and a business
organization--and none of these units is peculiarly prolific in the
creation of dæmonic individuals. We can bring forth Roosevelts--dynamic
creatures, to be sure; but the fury and the exultation of Jolson is a
hundred times higher in voltage than that of Roosevelt; we can produce
courageous and adventurous women who shoot lions or manage construction
gangs and remain pale beside the extraordinary “cutting loose” of Fanny
Brice.
To say that each of these two is possessed by a dæmon is a mediæval and
perfectly sound way of expressing their intensity of action. It does
not prove anything--not even that they are geniuses of a fairly high
rank, which in my opinion they are. I use the word possessed because
it connotes a quality lacking elsewhere on the stage, and to be found
only at moments in other aspects of American life--in religious mania,
in good jazz bands, in a rare outbreak of mob violence. The particular
intensity I mean is exactly what you do not see at a baseball game, but
may at a prize fight, nor in the productions of David Belasco, nor
at a political convention; you may see it on the Stock Exchange and
you can see it, canalized and disciplined, but still intense, in our
skyscraper architecture. It was visible at moments in the old Russian
Ballet.
In Jolson there is always one thing you can be sure of: that whatever
he does he does at the highest possible pressure. I do not mean that
one gets the sense of his effort, for his work is at times the easiest
seeming, the most effortless in the world. Only he never saves up--for
the next scene, or the next week, or the next show. His generosity is
extravagant; he flings into a comic song or three-minute impersonation
so much energy, violence, so much of the _totality_ of one human being,
that you feel it would suffice for a hundred others. In the days
when the runway was planked down the centre of every good theatre in
America, this galvanic little figure, leaping and shouting--yet always
essentially dancing and singing--upon it was the concentration of our
national health and gaiety. In _Row, Row, Row_ he would bounce up on
the runway, propel himself by imaginary oars over the heads of the
audience, draw equally imaginary slivers from the seat of his trousers,
and infuse into the song something wild and roaring and insanely funny.
The very phonograph record of his famous _Toreador_ song is full of
vitality. Even in later days when the programme announces simply “Al
Jolson” (about 10.15 P.M. in each of his reviews) he appears and
sings and talks to the audience and dances off--and when he has done
more than any other ten men, he returns and, blandly announcing that
“You ain’t heard nothing yet,” proceeds to do twice as much again. He
is the great master of the one-man show because he gives so much while
he is on that the audience remains content while he is off--and his
electrical energy almost always develops activity in those about him.
[Illustration:
FANNY BRICE
]
If it were necessary, a plea could be made for violence _per se_ in the
American theatre, because everything tends to prettify and restrain,
and the energy of the theatre is dying out. But Jolson, who lacks
discipline almost entirely, has other qualities besides violence. He
has an excellent baritone voice, a good ear for dialect, a nimble
presence, and a distinct sense of character. Of course it would be
impossible not to recognize him the moment he appears on the stage;
of course he is always Jolson--but he is also always Gus and always
Inbad the Porter, and always Bombo. He has created a way of being
for the characters he takes on; they live specifically in the mad
world of the Jolson show; their wit and their bathos are singularly
creditable characteristics of themselves--not of Jolson. You may
recall a scene--I think the show was called _Dancing Around_--in which
a lady knocks at the door of a house. From within comes the voice of
Jolson singing, “You made me love you, I didn’t wanna do it, I didn’t
wanna do it”--the voice approaches, dwindles away, resumes--it is a
swift characterization of the lazy servant coming to open the door and
ready to insult callers, since the master is out. Suddenly the black
face leaps through the doorway and cries out, “We don’ want no ice,”
and is gone. Or Jolson as the black slave of Columbus, reproached by
his master for a long absence. His lips begin to quiver, his chin
to tremble; the tears are approaching, when his human independence
softly asserts itself and he wails, “We all have our _moments_.” It
is quite true, for Jolson’s technique is the exploitation of these
moments; he has himself said that he is the greatest master of hokum
in the business, and in the theatre the art of hokum is to make each
second count for itself, to save any moment from dulness by the happy
intervention of a slap on the back, or by jumping out of character and
back again, or any other trick. For there is no question of legitimacy
here--everything is right if it makes ’em laugh.
He does more than make ’em laugh; he gives them what I am convinced
is a genuine emotional effect ranging from the thrill to the shock. I
remember coming home after eighteen months in Europe, during the war,
and stepping from the boat to one of the first nights of _Sinbad_. The
spectacle of Jolson’s vitality had the same quality as the impression
I got from the New York sky line--one had forgotten that there still
existed in the world a force so boundless, an exaltation so high,
and that anyone could still storm Heaven with laughter and cheers. He
sang on that occasion _’N Everything_ and _Swanee_. I have suggested
elsewhere that hearing him sing _Swanee_ is what book reviewers and
young girls loosely call an experience. I know what Jolson does with
false sentiment; here he was dealing with something which by the grace
of George Gershwin came true, and there was no necessity for putting
anything over. In the absurd black-face which is so little negroid that
it goes well with diversions in Yiddish accents, Jolson created image
after image of longing, and his existence through the song was wholly
in _its_ rhythm. Five years later I heard Jolson in a second-rate
show, before an audience listless or hostile, sing this outdated and
forgotten song, and create again, for each of us seated before him,
the same image--and saw also the tremendous leap in vitality and
happiness which took possession of the audience as he sang it. It was
marvelous. In the first weeks of _Sinbad_ he sang the words of _’N
Everything_ as they are printed. Gradually (I saw the show in many
phases) he interpolated, improvised, always with his absolute sense
of rhythmic effect; until at the end it was a series of amorous cries
and shouts of triumph to Eros. I have heard him sing also the absurd
song about “It isn’t raining rain, It’s raining violets” and remarked
him modulating that from sentimentality into a conscious bathos, with
his gloved fingers flittering together and his voice rising to absurd
_fortissimi_ and the general air of kidding the piece.
He does not generally kid his Mammy songs--as why should he who sings
them better than anyone else? He cannot underplay anything, he lacks
restraint, and he leans on the second-rate sentiment of these songs
until they are forced to render up the little that is real in them.
I dislike them and dislike his doing them--as I dislike Belle Baker
singing _Elie, Elie!_ But it is quite possible that my discomfort at
these exhibitions is proof of their quality. They and a few very cheap
jokes and a few sly remarks about sexual perversions are Jolson’s only
faults. They are few. For a man who has, year after year, established
an intimate relation with no less than a million people, every
twelvemonth, he is singularly uncorrupted. That relation is the thing
which sets him so far above all the other one-man-show stars. Eddie
Cantor gives at times the effect of being as energetic; Wynn is always
and Tinney sometimes funnier. But no one else, except Miss Brice, so
holds an audience in the hollow of the hand. The hand is steady; the
audience never moves. And on the great nights when everything is right,
Jolson is driven by a power beyond himself. One sees that he knows what
he is doing, but one sees that he doesn’t half realize the power and
intensity with which he is doing it. In those moments I cannot help
thinking of him as a genius.
Quite to that point Fanny Brice hasn’t reached. She hasn’t, to begin
with, the physical vitality of Jolson. But she has a more delicate
mind and a richer humour--qualities which generally destroy vitality
altogether, and which only enrich hers. She is first a great farceur;
and in her songs she is exactly in the tradition of Yvette Guilbert,
without the range, so far as we know, which enabled Mme Guilbert to
create the whole of mediæval France for us in ten lines of a song.
The quality, however, is the same, and Fanny’s evocations are as
vivid and as poignant as Yvette’s--they require from us exactly the
same tribute of admiration. She has grown in power since she sang and
made immortal, _I Should Worry_. Hear her now creating the tragedy
of _Second-Hand Rose_ or of the one Florodora Baby who--“five little
dumbells got married for money, And I got married for love....” These
things are done with two-thirds of Yvette Guilbert’s material missing,
for there are no accessories and, although the words (some of the best
are by Blanche Merrill) are good, the music isn’t always distinguished.
And the effects are irreproachable. Give Fanny a song she can get
her teeth into, _Mon Homme_, and the result is less certain, but not
less interesting. This was one of a series of realistic songs for
Mistinguett, who sang it very much as Yvonne George did when she
appeared in America. Miss Brice took it _lento affetuoso_; since the
precise character of the song had changed a bit from its rather more
outspoken French original. Miss Brice suppressed Fanny altogether in
this song--she was being, I fear, “a serious artist”; but she is of
such an extraordinary talent that she can do even this. Yvonne George
sang it better simply because the figure she evoked as Mon Homme was
exactly the fake apache about whom it was written, and not the “my
feller” who lurked behind Miss Brice. It was amusing to learn that
without a Yiddish accent and without those immense rushes of drollery,
without the enormous gawkishness of her other impersonations, Miss
Brice could put a song over. But I am for Fanny against Miss Brice and
to Fanny I return.