One wonders if she will not be able to develop material which will enable her to appear to even better advantage.
The "new edition" of the Ziegfeld Follies is a considerable improvement on the old—in fact it is one of the very best Follies I remember. The new acts which have been substituted are not only, in general, more interesting than the old, but they also fit better in the Follies: in almost every case, you have a high pressure act substituted for a vague or slowly moving one. Instead of Ring Lardner's rather casual Rip Van Winkle sketch you have a terrific team of rube dancers, and for the halting drawl of Will Rogers you have the machine-like energy of Eddie Cantor. Furthermore, Ann Pennington has been added, so that, with Cantor and Gilda Gray, you have perhaps the three highest pressure performers in the city all under the same canvas. The tempo of the show is now uniform and it is the same as that of the life outside. It is New York in terms of entertainment—the expression of extreme nervous intensity to the tune of harsh complicated harmonies. When you take the subway after the theatre, it speeds you straight with a crash to your goal, like a song by Eddie Cantor; and in the roar of the nocturnal city, driven rhythmically for all its confusion, you catch hoarse echoes of Gilda Gray singing her incomparable Come Along!
One instrument in the great jazz band of New York has suddenly been silenced: Bert Savoy is dead. But the comic character he created will never be forgotten by those who saw it. When he used to come reeling on to the stage, a gigantic red-haired harlot, swaying her enormous hat, reeking with the corrosive cocktails of the West Fifties, one felt oneself in the presence of the vast vulgarity of New York incarnate and made heroic. Well, we have heard the last of Margy's wise-cracks and the thought is a genuinely sad one. Still, in the brash nights of the city, between Reisenweber's and the Montmartre, we shall sometimes be haunted by the accents of a gasping raucous voice, hard-boiled, shamefully obscene, but in a continual tremor of female excitement: "I'm so glad you asked me that, dearie! You don't know the half of it, dearie! You don't know the half of it, dearie!"
