CRIMSON PLAYGOER

"Sign on the dotted line! Ha! Har! Haar!!"

The sound of these loudly spoken words will echo in the ears of sober Boston for a long time after "The Show-Off" leaves town. And with the sound will go the memory of flashy clothes, a dapper moustache and a pose half like Napoelon and half like a peacock parade.

For, well conceived and executed as it is. "The Show-Off" is noteworthy more as a single character than as a play. Aubrey Piper, the show-off, is untruthful enough, jaunty enough, boastful enough, ignorant enough--"Stick-transit Gloria Monday"--objectionable enough and well-meaning enough to carry any play to distinction. Louis John Bartels makes the most of his opportunities. You remember Percy and Ferdy, the Hallroom Boys. Well, the show-off is both of them and all the rest of their ilk rolled into one.

His chief desire, poor man, is to make a good impression. Poorly paid, he hints at his rich friends; insignificant, he talks of the great; uneducated, he prattles of Shakespeare and quotes frightful Latin. Such men invariably fool some people; although he disgusts Mrs. Fisher (Helen Lowell) he wins the heart of her daughter Amy (Wintfred Wellington); and though the Fishers all think Amy a nit-wit to marry him. Piper proves, by his efforts to save their talented son from being swindled out of his rights as an inventor, that he is the best friend of the family.

The show-off is so true to life, withal, that many of the show-offs in the audience have been known to remain quiet for several hours after the performance. But soon, with unconscious imitation of Mr. Bartels' manner, they all said, "That's all right, Mama, leave it to me, I'm the little fixer" or "Sign on the dotted line", or "Ha! Har! Haar!!" C. DuB.

In his speeches before the Theatregoers Club and other high-minded organizations Mr. Clive has periodically bemoaned the necessity of descending to inprior productions at the Copley theatre for the sake of luring into the box office the copeks of unappreciative Boston audiences.

But on Monday night at the Copley in "The Jeffersons," a comedy in three acts by Vincent Douglass, E. E. Clive & Co. made the descent, seemingly with great gusto and few regrets.

It was, decidedly, a play for the groundlings. Readers of the American Magazine, students of the I. C. S., burrowers in the Five Foot Bookshelf are all given a guarantee of enjoyment.

A modern "success" story, dramatized, and done into Lancashire for the sake of picturesqueness, that is "The Jeffersons."

A feud between two Lancashire mill owners, Messrs. Jefferson and Mosscrop, an untoward romance between their respective offspring, Rosie and Reggie, Silas P. Mallinson, an American inventor, whose ingenious little device enables Owner Jefferson to turn the tables, as the saying is, upon Owner Mosscrop,--are the well worn cogs on which this obsolete old piece of dramatic machinery heavily revolves. Needless to say, Owner Jefferson bluntly refuses to countenance the romance, but the combined efforts of Owner Mosscrop who undergoes a sudden reformation of character, of Son Reggie who announces bumptiously that he is full of "grit and determination" and will "move heaven and earth" to win Rosie; of Daughter Rosie who indulges in tears and threats of elopement; and of Mother Jefferson, who does likewise; reduce the old man to submission and the curtain drops on general drinking of whiskey and water and interchange of amiable osculations.

Mr. Clive, as Jefferson, is of, course, very funny, and Charles Vane, as Mosscrop, contributed a genuine bit of acting. But the play was not redeemed by anyone. It is a pity that Inventor Mallinson could not have perfected a few ingenious devices for the plot as well as for the cotton mills about which it centers