THE SHANGHAI GESTURE

Mysteriously appearing from beneath the stage, the jazz orchestra leader stands on his unseen pedestal, raises his baton. To the elfing ripple of piano, the squeal of clarinet, the deep-throated protest of the bass saxaphone, and the triumphant laughter of the trumpet, the great gray house curtain rises slowly into the flies. Vanishing, it reveals the show curtain, pride of the company, whether of an appetite for clean fun in the academic halls there depicted, and a justifiable pride in this curtain which creates in advance the collegiate atmosphere for what Grantland Rice though "the only really convincing college show I have ever seen."

And why not? Look closer, and one finds the curtain to be practically an airplane map of Cambridge. There is Massachusetts Hall, there a quadrangle in the Georgian style. The campus of Tait is cloistered. There are ivy-covered towers, containing, by the way, college bells of familiar penetration. It were piddling to find fault because Agassiz Hall has alighted cheek-by-jowl with Holworthy, with no thought of what havoc such change would raise in the architectural scheme of Brattle Stret.

That there should be "a regular Tait cheer" and that the cheer should be given with a will--and a resemblance--is in key with the whole.

The scene designer, in his undergraduate days at Cambridge, saw that the ugyl duckling need not be ever drab, which is certainly good news.