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.HE principal elements of the average American revue are a flight of steps down which an assortment of tall hussies dressed up like so many Chinese restaurants troop majestically at intervals of every twenty minutes, a ballet in which a toe dancer whirls around rapidly for a dozen times, falls in a heap and thus depicts, according to the program, "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire," one joke about the income tax and another about monkey glands, a song number in which the coy girl star is flirtatiously chased around the stage by the male chorus in evening clothes, and a sketch in which an actress who bears a striking resemblance to Marie Dressier gives an imitation of Jeanne Eagles by putting on a blonde wig and a pair of white stockings and striking an attitude like Benny Leonard. In this revue, save on rare occasions, there is approximately as much jollity as one finds in a case of White Rock. Two hundred thousand dollars is spent for
costumes, scenery and expensive performers and then, a few hours before the dress rehearsal, the producer telegraphs Tommy Gray or Ring Lardner a couple of hundred dollars to get busy and think up something funny to stick into the $50,000 Diamond Horseshoe scene. Chariot, the London revue producer, works the other way 'round. He first lays in enough good comedy to fill the evening and then thinks up the expensive decorations and embellishments. After he has thought up these expensive decorations and embellishments, he promptly proceeds to forget them. And the result is a revue that is twice as amusing as
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Q Says Mr. Nathan
the majority we get from our native impresarios. The Chariot ''Revue of 1924," currently on view in New York, is excellent light entertainment. For every three hundred dollar costume, there is a five hundred dollar joke. And in Beatrice Lillie and Gertrude Lawrence it has the two best music show performers of the London stage.
Chariot's Revue is excellent light entertainment. For every three hundred dollar costume there is a five hundred dollar joke.
The Way Things Happen is too stale to pop present day interest.
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' lemence Dane's "The Way Things Happen" played in Philadelphia before opening in New York and made a profound impression. You now know what it is like. Over in Philadelphia, any play in which
The Living Mask is a stage-struck novelette.
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the heroine surrenders her person to the villain in order to get the papers that will save the honor of the hero still works the populace up to fever heat. The dramatic taste of the Pennsylvania metropolis continues to linger in the Henry Arthur Jones*\ and early Pinero epoch, when women's virtue was regarded as the strongest of all dramatic themes and when any scene that showed a girl about to give herself to an actor in a gray toupee and with a gardenia in his button-hole — thus identified a villain — was certain to be a subject of discussion for the next three or four weeks. Miss Dane's play carries a wrong date line. It is at least twenty years behind the times. It belongs to that period of the Anglo-Saxon drama when no woman ever left a bachelor's chambers without leaving a telltale wrap or pair of gloves behind her and when the news of the villain's painful death in South Africa always arrived in