December 9, 1930

Gilded Gotham

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Audio Excerpt

Libby Holman Sings 'Love for Sale'

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By BROOKS ATKINSON

n the program of "The New Yorkers," which careened across the Broadway Theatre stage last evening, they describe it as a "sociological musical satire," but that is only their impish sense of humor. For Jimmy Durante and his two muggs split it asunder all through the evening with their wild bursts of comedy; and the bookmaker, the composer, and the directors, working under the modishly gargantuan influence of Peter Arno, have kept as far away from sociology as boisterous entertainment can. It is a fairly local saturnalia. After the curtain has been up five minutes Hope Williams is permitted to describe Park Avenue as the street where bad women walk with good dogs; and somewhere amid the frenzy of gilded Gotham Richard Carle shouts passionately, "You stole my wife, you horsethief!" What with one thing and another, "The New Yorkers" manages to pack most of the madness, ribaldry, bounce and comic loose ends of giddy Manhattan into a lively musical show.

At last Jimmy (Schnozzle) Durante and his low-life playmates have been fitted into a musical show. The steam they generate cooks the entire feast. With Jimmy comedy runs a feverish temperature, delivers a knockout blow every ten seconds and ruins all the props in sight. He begins with one of his own poetic anthems, frankly entitled "The Hot Patata." Throughout the rest of the evening he fights his way through other learned subjects in a frenzy of hat-throwing, pal-slapping excitement with bloodthirsty assaults on the innocent orchestra. You should see him, as the "inventorer" of an alcoholic "builder-upper" for run-down patients, mixing his yeasty compound, heroically holding the world at bay, rushing to the microphone to pant his exhaustion to the far corners of the world--doing everything, as he puts it, quick as a flask. Once he submits to Cole Porter's suave lyrics and music in a funny number with Hope Williams, whose sense of comedy is sympathetic and robust enough to hold to its own against Jimmy's tornado of buffoonery. But when Jimmy hurls his energies into a monstrous paean of wood as the first-act finale, shouts himself hoarse over wood's honorable career in the making of the American nation, and, then, with his sweating comrades, crowds the stage with rhymeless exhibits of wooden objects--boxes, trees, doors, bars, violins, bass drums, single-horse express wagons--"The New Yorkers" is as overpoweringly funny as a weak-muscled theatregoer can endure.

There are others in the cast. Hope Williams, taking a holiday from the heavy-hearted gallantry of drama, strides her calm, good-natured way through night clubs, underground passages to gin mills and family parties, giving a style and glamour to every scene. Frances Williams sings and fidgets. Ann Pennington dances a saucy measure. Charles King radiates health and handsomeness as a racketeer. Marie Cahill and Richard Carle are ready to be funnier than the lines permit. Now and then, when some one happens to think of it, a regulation chorus directs attention to the symmetry of the shank and rapture of the knee.

Most of Cole Porter's tunes and rhymes hold well to the average of song-and-dance scores, patiently reminding you once that "Love can make you happy; love can make you blue." But for "The Great Indoors," celebrating the luxury of week-ends immune from fresh-air poisoning, he has done original research; and his two male college songs, one for the Sing Sing, have something refreshing to say. The staging gives a fillip to all the ingredients, playing smart tricks with lights in the darkness, using megaphones in a spectacular drill and pounding out tunes on the musical bars of a prison cell. Much of "The New Yorkers'" sociology is for adults with thick ears and heroic digestions. For the halls of pleasure "The New Yorkers" frequently are more gilded than virtuous. Well, Jimmy Durante is there.

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