Page:The Dial (Volume 75).djvu/600



IGH Spots of the New Season: Ralph Barton's poster of the Lady Pincushion on the side-show tent in and W. C. Fields appearing for the first time in history in a speaking part (he proves to have a high tremulous tenor rather like a refined and appealing eloquent preacher). The spiritualist-detective play, which combines the sinister excitement of melodrama with the agreeable surprise of a conjuring performance. In this play, a man who wants to rob a safe commits a dangerous murder, stages a fake spiritualistic seance, fills the pockets of a whole assemblage of people with objects designed falsely to cast suspicion on them, and with the aid of a whole army of accomplices succeeds in installing highly complicated mechanical devices in a house in which people are living. There is no nonsense about explaining why he went to all this trouble—why, since he knew the combination, he didn't simply go and open the safe, instead of spending days and weeks filling the house with conjuring tricks; and that is why the play is fascinating; it is fascinating like one of Goldberg's devices for killing flies or eating soup without a spoon. The take-off on spiritualist-detective plays in the —also, in this latter, Mr Benchley's great Endowment Fund speech and some of Irving Berlin's jazz counterpoint, especially the curious modernized waltz with its shivery opening descent, like sinking in an express elevator. The colours and costumes of the and some of the tumbling and trick dancing. Otherwise, the is not quite up to standard this year: it re-echoes a little forlornly in the, which is much too big for it and seems, besides, to have infected it with banality. Miss Katharine Cornell's gorgeous blue and rose crinolines in —which, however, are the best thing in the production. Miss Cornell is extremely pretty in her eighteenth century costumes, but her performance is rather hollow. I tried hard, but I could not believe in her love affair with Casanova. But that is perhaps not altogether her fault: in the first place, Mr Lowell Sherman, though fairly plausible as a quick-witted knave, in emotional scenes is impossible; and in the second, the play itself is so