THE THEATRE
AMONG the summer shows, so far as I have seen them, the Follies is the most satisfactory. Aren't We All? is an amusing enough little English comedy which would be more amusing if it were less good-natured. The Winter Garden has some good comedians, but very few funny ideas. Helen of Troy, New York, a musical comedy by Connelly and Kaufman, is only mildly amusing in itself. The authors have tried to transplant to musical comedy the business satire of To the Ladies, but in rather an indifferent and perfunctory fashion; and they have eked out their satiric material with all the clichés of the machine-made show. These devices, which carry Sally to triumph, leave Messrs Connelly and Kaufman flat. They have reckoned without the great principle—amply illustrated by Helen of Troy—that the stupid jokes of clever people can never hope to be so successful as the stupid jokes of stupid people. Clever people have a way of spoiling banality by betraying that they do not believe in it. They engage in it without spirit and their lack of enthusiasm usually shows. Right against a gag aimed at the boobs they will write a sarcasm intended for the intelligent, with the result that the latter are left unsatisfied while the fun has been spoiled for the former. I believe that the authors of Helen of Troy would have been more successful in having the complete courage of their convictions than in at- tempting to guarantee themselves against failure by dragging in all the old tricks.
The real vitality of Helen of Troy is supplied by Miss Queenie Smith, who brings delicacy as well as verve to the rôle of the comic second woman. A former member of the Metropolitan ballet, she has learned a singular deftness of pantomime, and a genuine aesthetic instinct to which she subordinates all she does. Her burlesque Pavlowa ballet is the best I have ever seen—better even than Fannie Brice's or James Watts'—because it is graceful as well as funny. She has a gift for swift changes of mood—rather perhaps when she is dancing than when she is acting—which in its sureness and its distinction even recalls a little Yvette Guilbert. Light and shadow, awkwardness and grace flutter her tiny figure like a breeze.
