New Plays in Manhattan

The Gang's All Here. Artist Russell Patterson designed the costumes, Oscar Hammerstein II helped the direction, Colyumist Russel Grouse wrote the book, Tilly Losch staged the ballet. The cast includes: luscious Gina Malo (Sons O' Guns); red-headed Zelma O'Neal (Good News); silly Ruth Tester (Second Little Show); the white-faced team of Shaw & Lee, droll Tom Howard and ingratiating Ted Healy. And seldom has wealth been more hopelessly, tastelessly squandered.

The book, which begins to relate the stalking of Mr. Howard by a gang of gunmen at Atlantic City,, suddenly goes insanely askew. Tom? Howard has an hilarious conversation with a ghost, but the show's few genuinely good moments are supplied by a hitherto unknown young man named Hal Le Roy whose tapdancing is peerless. None of the music, none of the gags, save The Gang's All Here from being a pretty waste of money.

Heat Wave is another play about the tropics where white women are careless of their virtue, white men foolish with their drink and only the natives retain a stealthy dignity. Handsome Basil Rathbone (The Command to Love) is the dissolute Nordic who is pursued by Irene March (Betty Lawford) but who really loves Irene's married sister-in-law Philippa (Selena Royle). For all his tippling and reputed wenching the Nordic is a brave lonely man, fighting fever and the opposition of public opinion in the district. This general resentment culminates in Philippa's husband taking a shot at Mr. Rathbone.

The play is pitiably hackneyed. Admirers of Mr. Rathbone could not blame him for his weak performance.

The Great Harrington, This play makes a bungling attempt at the temporal trickery which Mr. Henry James originally thought up and which was later used in a play called Berkeley Square. But instead of plausibly explaining the hiatus which exists between the dead past and the present as did Berkeley Square, the playwright of The Great Barrington simply has the swashbuckling Barrington ancestors flit among their haughty descendants in the ancient house on the banks of the Hudson. It develops that the democratic daughter of the modern Barringtons wants to marry a poor but honest young man. She is thwarted, however, by her prideful parents who remind her of the duty she owes the memory of her sainted forebears. In the meantime, the forebears are busy stealing, seducing, murdering one another right under the modern Barringtons' noses. Finally, not one but two grisly skeletons are discovered in a hidden family closet, the elder Barringtons are crestfallen, the girl gets her boy.

Had the name of George M. Cohan appeared on the program, audiences would have sensed a burlesque, instantly. Otto Kruger heads the cast, probably regrets it.

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