We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
The Play of the Month
By KENNETH MACGOWAN
White
CRITICS have certain very entertaining habits. One is to lay the faults of the newspaper reviews to the fact that they have to be written in the first forty-five minutes after the curtain falls. Another Hazlittian habit is for the critics on the weeklies and monthlies to review the reviews instead of the plays, to pan the forty-five-minute opinions of the daily critics instead of panning the play.
In writing about "Abie's Irish Rose" in the year of grace 1924, I naturally escape a lot of the troubles connected with that habit-forming drug-on-the-market, dramatic criticism.
On the May evening of 1922 when Anne Nichols' play was exhibited to the pained, but not at all surprised collection of second-string reviewers, I was watching a chorus of bulky Berlin damsels coyly pulling a petticoat half an inch above a Gargantuan ankle while they sang about the naughtiness of a "Maedel von siebzehn Jahr." If I had been in New York, I should have revenged myself on the weather and the whole stage by completely losing patience with the kind of show we have to see ninetyseven evenings out of one hundred and twenty-one. I should have declared that "Abie's Irish Rose" was as obvious as a Third Avenue ham
sandwich and about as tasteful. And — blissfully unable to penetrate two years of theatrical history — I should have declared that this bit of hokum would never, never last out the week. Now this would have been perfectly all right as a revenge and an estimate on the level of Broadway drama. But I would find it just a little embarrassing today to read the electric sign outside the Republic Theater — "3rd Year." And as for hearing that "Abie's Irish Rose" had spent fifteen weeks in Washington, twelve weeks in Baltimore, seven months in Pittsburgh, eight months or more in Cleveland, ten weeks in Montreal and twice as long in Toronto, twelve weeks in Columbus, ten in Atlantic City, and eighteen nights in Erie, Pennsylvania— the spectacle of going so (Continued on page 89)
The phenomenon of "Abie's Irish Rose" is still puzzling theatrical savants. When it first appeared nearly three years ago it was universally condemned by the critics. Since then it has earned more than a million dollars for its author and producer, Ann Nichols, pictured below. Left are Alfred White, Jack Bertin, Harry Bradley and Andrew Mack
Apeda
(Forty-six)