Picture Play Magazine (Mar-Aug 1924)

On the New York Stage 69 Photo by White "The Flame of Love" is a colorful Chinese tragedy. exactly what you might call "gripping." It is interspersed by pleasant enough music and some skillful dancing by Albertina Vitak and Lovey Lee. Suzanne Keener plays Peg after the best Laurette Taylor traditions. Not So Innocent. The Winter Garden opened for the summer with "Innocent Eyes." Its title is misleading for the piece was evidently written to display the usual line of lovely, but not innocent, legs. It also served to introduce Mistinguett from France, the grand old lady of the Paris music halls, who swings a wicked apache dance. There is more dancing by Vannessi and a good-looking chorus as rhythmic as the Tiller girls. But, it is short on humor, and aside from these antics, is lavish, expensive, glittering and dull. Like many of its show girls, it is beautiful and dumb. Grand Street "Follies." There is a demure little brick theater in the heart of the East Side called the Neighborhood Playhouse. For the best part of the year it goes serenely on producing Galsworthy and Bernard Shaw without any regard for the passing show way uptown on Broadway. But once in every season, it has its annual little joke on Broadway. It gives a burlesque performance of the uptown season which for sheer wit and impudence surpasses anything that is being done on the Rialto — except perhaps the "Chariot Revue," which it somewhat resembles. Some time, some producer is going to realize that there is a gold mine in these productions and cart the entire company to an uptown theater. That is, if they will go. For the Neighborhood Players are an independent lot and honestly enjoy putting on their plays for their own, and their neighbors', entertainment. Einstein Dramatized. Incidentally, it was this same Neighborhood group that produced a strange and haunting drama, "Time Is a Dream." It was based on the Einstein theory and by way of introduction, they ran that fascinating film which does its best to make clear some idea of the theory of relativity. Einstein himself said that only twelve men in the world understood his theory and it is reasonable to suppose that this group did not include the current movie and dramatic critics. But at least the play, and even more the film, gives tantalizing hints of a new world which are most thrilling to consider. There is little chance that "Time Is a Dream" will ever reach Broadway or points west. But the Einstein film is probably being shown all over the country. Watch for it at your movie house, if you want to discover a new and thrilling use for the screen. "The Bride." Peggy Wood has deserted the musical comedies for her first legitimate play. It always seems a pity when a lovely voice is muted because the owner fancies himself as an actor, though this, of course, is justified if he is a really great actor or his medium is a really great play. But "The Bride" seems one of the saddest excuses for a crook drama that has reached these footlights in many seasons. It isn't actually bad — not bad enough to be funny — but all the worn-out old trails that can surround the stolen jewels are followed until you reach the hopelessly banal conclusion. Miss Wood can act — and does — very charmingly. But you miss her songs — such songs as she had in "The Clinging Vine" — at every turn. It irritates you to sit through a performance like this with a constant sense of something lacking. Still they will do it. We even have John Charles Thomas, one of the best baritones on the concert stage to-day, going gravely through the gyrations of a long, elaborate and stupid movie. There must be something about the silent drama that appeals to singers. Unfortunately, the type that need it most refuse to be captured by the pictures. We have a long list of singers that we would love to find in the silent drama — and the more silent the better. But we wish the real musicians would stick to their melodic line.