THE THEATRE.
"PUPPETS" AT THE VAUDEVILLE.
Wnv should it be funny to see one actress imitate another and Mr. Stanley Lupino pretend he is Mr. Lupino Lane ? I don't know, but it is. In the case of Miss Binnie Hale the pleasure certainly had something to do with one's enjoyment of conjuring. How she managed to make herself, in the course of ten minutes, look first like Miss Evelyn Laye, then like Miss Beatrice Lillie, and finally like Miss Jose Collins, I cannot imagine. Miss Collins is massive and Miss Binnie Hale's face broadened to a comparable grandeur of proportion : Miss Beatrice Lillie is slim, retroussee and elfish, and Miss Binnie Hale's face contracted, while when she was Miss Laye her eyes goggled and her mouth pouted to admiration. I loved the inspiration that made her, as Miss Jose Collins, hang her peasant blouse with string upon string of huge pearls and edge her apron with ermine.
I have never seen Mr. Lupino before, except in those boisterous parts where you have a hat four sizes too small, grasp your cane in the middle with a hand clad in a glove with double-lengthened fingers, and in which you may not walk across the stage without dislocating alternate hips and looking suddenly with raised eyebrows over your shoulder. But in the playlets with which Puppets is interspersed he acts several more or less straight parts and acts them well, and is not only funny, but sympathetic and attractive.
Into one turn called Barbary the devisers of Puppets manage to put a real thrill. It is a little ballet that would never have happened but for Chauve Souris and The Blue Bird, and it has music that would never have occurred to Mr. Ivor Novello without a Rimsky-Korsakov, but it was none the worse for that, in fact rather the better and even the more legitimate, for half the charm of revue lies in allusion (the comedian's pop with his lips is not funny intrinsically), and so it seems to me proper and admirable that Barbary should be derivative.
The point is that it is good, and that the moth-white captive who beats herself in vain against the ring of fierce, fantastic girls awakens a distinct emotion. But though Puppets is a good revue, I liked the imitations best. They have a never-ending charm of which not the least feature is the fact that you can be perfectly sure that in two minutes a turn will be presented in all good faith which is at least as absurd as anything that has been ridiculed, for example, in the present instance, Tapping and Hoops and Sawdust.
The fact presents a series of engaging problems. TARN.
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