The Crimson Playgoer

The stunning array of truly exceptional dramatic and motion picture offerings which confront Boston theatregoers this week sets the high water mark for the year. The polished Abbey Players with their beautiful Elleen Crowo present a sophisticated yet poetically smooth type of drama that must appeal to the most sincere and intellectual appreciation.

"Of Thee I Sing," Pulitzer Prize winner, endowed with an equally high-callbred beauty of an opposite type in blonde Lois Moran, has apparently swept the theatrical world of the East. Its very pace and quality is so high powered as to guarantee that it can overcome the most obdurate critic and most cynical customer.

At the same time the return of George M. Cohan with his "Pigeons and People" and the continuing of the amazingly effective Negro review "Hi-De-Ho," at the Wilbur, while of secondary importance, still rank high.

Turning to the screen we find "Cavalcade," at popular prices at the Metropolitan while "Gabriel Over the While House," Katherine Hepburn in "Christopher Strong," and "42nd Street" are still in the immediate vicinity. "Cavalcade" and "42nd Street" illustrate the increasingly effective use of musical themes and orchestral backgrounds in building up emotional effects in harmony with the picture. Thus one of the greatest virtues of the silent film has been resurrected. The orchestral background is the 1933 prototype of the organ which played "Oh Susanna" for the "Covered Wagon" and "Marche Slav" when brontosauri stalked through "The Lost World." The whistling epidemic that has swept Harvard since "42nd Street" was the child not of single renditions of "Shufile Off to Buffalo," "I'm Young and Healthy," etc. but of the almost constant playing of all of these tunes through the entire six reels.

Dropping in for an act and a half of the Radcliffe Idler's "Ariadne," the Playgoer was favorably impressed by Misses Jean Goodale and Mary Capen; also with the fact that amateur performances rarely succeed in avoiding what for a better word one might call "foreshadowing." Either because of over-rehearsal or too great absorption with their own lines, certain members of the cast started gestures of reply ever before the question or cue had been spoken to them. Freshness and surprise in the repartee was as a consequence diminished.

"The King of Gatecrashers" was the American translation of the latest French film shown at the Geography Building. These pictures which are by no means "educational" movies have been made possible by the efforts of Mrs. E. K. Rand. Both for the spiciness of the productions selected and for the admirable opportunity which the pictures offer for advancing class-room "French" into actual conversational knowledge it is to be hoped that some means will be found to continue them.

Digressing, the Playgoer has learned that experiments among law school students have revealed that given two men of equal ability, the one studying five nights a week and "making a week-end of it" obtains higher grades than the man who surrenders all seven nights to study. Renders in the Senior and Junior classes are free to discover what implication they will in this finding.