THE THEATRE
',sky High." At the Phoenix Theatre.
THE stage is bigger, the settings more elaborate, the costumes more kaleidoscopic than in those far-off days when the two Hermiones divided our pleasures between two small theatres instead of com- bining them into one large one ; but the material is very much the same. To say that it is not so good as in the previous show might be unfair. It is probably just as good, but it is also far too similar. For aught I know, Miss Gingold's lecture on bicycling is—as Bertie Wooster would say—of the essence ; but one cannot feel that it is really as good as her lecture on the music of Bucolosi. In the same way Miss Baddeley's tropical vamp hardly stands up to her Chelsea drab or her equally famous Madam Butterfly. On the other hand, the two Hermiones together have seldom, if ever, equalled their antics as two ladies of the deep, scanning the barnacled bottoms of passing ships and making dates by impaling letters on convenient anchors ; Miss Baddeley's yellow wig (which, as her opposite number acidly points out, is full of surf) is in itself worth a pair of opera glasses, while Miss Gingold's refusal (by telephone) of a boatswain's offer to mate, is a model of undersea curtness.
There is a good deal of the usual sort of revue-dancing and revue- singing, which is quite pretty to look at ; and there is also a fine effort by Walter Crisham, splendidly out-of-step and out-of-voice as the Norwood Nightingale—a choir-boy whose voice has capitu- lated to the onslaught of adolescence. Of the two newcomers to the usual galaxy, Naunton Wayne, with the exception of an excellent parody of Emlyn Williams, is given little opportunity to exercise his dry and delicious wit ; while Elizabeth Welch, simply by refusing to let anything damp her splendid exuberance and her magnificent voice, infuses an electric excitement into a series of musical clichés. If only someone would let her take the stage for fifteen minutes with, say, a programme of unadulterated Calypsos—that would indeed be a revue-item worth seeing and hearing.
BASIL WRIGHT.
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