The Dial (Third Series)/Volume 75/The Theatre (September 1923)
THE THEATRE
TWO new revues. The Vanities of 1923 is an attempt to do the Music Box in terms of the Winter Garden, but it has a subtle flavour of bad taste which is all its own. Joe Cook is the one sound spot. His old act perhaps suffers a little in spontaneity by being transferred from vaudeville to a revue: they have made him wear shiny shoes and a correct blue serge suit, with a handkerchief sticking out of the pocket, and I cannot but feel that his old high vein of lunacy is a little cramped; but he reveals unsuspected powers of burlesque acting in a skit with Peggy Joyce in which he impersonates Wesley Brown, "of the Six Brown Brothers," a musician living in Paris, who lures an elegant lady to his apartment and seduces her by playing the Jew's harp.—The Fashions of 1924 is, on the other hand, rather agreeable—nothing very dazzling: a comic prize fight, some pretty girls in gym suits, a skit about the servant problem, and a fantastic ballet depicting "the bewildering fantasies of an imaginative man who, through continual puzzling over the mysteries of life, becomes insane." But it is one of the better summer shows; it does not exhaust you with its banality.
Both of these revues seem to be produced in association with prominent dressmakers and furriers, who use them as advertising mediums. The advertisers have already laid waste the countryside, achieved a censorship over the contents of magazines, and reduced the works of the great artists and savants to finely printed little blocks of text, which are used to wad out large pages on Campbell's Soup and Vacuum Cup Tires, and now, it appears, they are beginning to determine the character of theatrical entertainment. It is not inconceivable that the day will come when works of art of all kinds will be produced to promote the sale of motor-cars and canned salad dressing. This is a prospect which, I suppose, will be hailed with cheers by Mr Matthew Josephson, who regards the advertisers as the genuine artists and the people who object to the commercial ideal as contemptible "small persecuted colonies"; but I confess I am on the side of the persecuted. I cannot get over the idea that people who pursue the arts for their own sake deserve more respect than the people who hire themselves out as ballyhoos for breakfast foods and deodorants. But now it seems I have the literary snobs against me as well as the manufacturers, and since I have read that the editor of Broom considers the copy of advertising writers more artistically important than the poetry of Elinor Wylie, I am a little timid about asserting in a magazine as cultivated as this one that I am annoyed at seeing theatrical entertainments run as adjuncts to the fur business.
But I will assert without hesitation that Seventh Heaven ought to be censored—if anything is to be censored. I have just seen this play for the first time after its triumphant run of a whole season and I protest that it contains the most frightful moral idea I have ever encountered on stage or screen—and it is only the other day that I saw a movie heroine not only restored to perfect tranquillity herself, but also completely cleared of guilt in the eyes of everybody else by discovering that her husband, whom she had tried to poison, had actually died from some other cause. In Seventh Heaven Mr Austin Strong shows us a faithful little French gamine who falls in love with an atheist street-cleaner. This fellow sneers freely at "le bon dieu" and tries to dissuade his mistress from believing in Him. But Chico goes off to war and the day that the armistice is signed they tell Diane that her lover is dead—whereupon she flies into a fury of grief and turns bitterly upon the good old abbé who has been trying to comfort her: "He was right after all!" she cries, "I know now there can be no bon dieu!" Then immediately Chico appears; he has not been killed at all; and Diane quickly changes her mind. "I know now that the abbé was right!" she sobs. "There is a bon dieu after all!"—Well, my feeling is that this idea, which is presented not merely as the cry of a simple heart, but apparently as the moral theme of the play, would be an excellent subject for suppression. I don't see why the essentially truthful, if rather squalid, tragedy of The God of Vengeance should be banished from the New York stage while it is permitted to teach people that God is good because, in a war where seven million men were killed, He has rescued one woman's lover.