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
