CONTEMPORARY ARTS
THE THEATRE
"King's Rhapsody." By Ivor Novello. (Palace.) Tile vast auditorium of the Palace Theatre has an audience and an atmosphere all its own. The average age is higher (I refer, of course, to the receiving side of the footlights), the average figure plumper, the air homelier. It is as crowded and as cosy as Blackpool beach, and on the far side of the orchestra is an ever-changing spectacle that comfortably combines grandeur and familiarity, as at Blackpool's Tower Ballroom, together with the painless Palm-Court music of the nicer kind of hotel, dear. It was the same, they tell me, at Perchance to Dream and The Dancing Years, so that, although one may reasonably wonder how Mr. Ivor Novello does it, there is no doubt at all about what he does. He packs 'cm in.
He packs 'em in as Oklahoma does, or Annie, with their tunes, their pace, their comedy and their trim, pretty, and well-dressed choruses. And it is not only that Mr. Novello works his nightly, monthly, year-after-year miracle without benefit of any of these ; he shrugs off, too, the sure-fire ingredients of yesteryear. So that what is surprising about Mr. Novello's success is not that he achieves it without an Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin' ! but that he doe: it without a Merry Widow Waltz either. It is not remarkable that he refrains from making his leading lady a comic figure, like the Annie of Annie Get Your Gun ; the remarkable thing is that in his latest " musical romance " there is no comic figure at all, no part either for a George Graves of our day or for a pert soubrette.
Part of his secret, surely, is that by now he and his audience are old friends. Gorgeous as he may be in the black-and-silver of a Balkan king on duty of in the brocaded dressing-gown of a royal
week-end; by ohe Miss Dare as a king's mother and another iss Dare as a king's mistress ; surrounded by female gipsy dancers and a male chorus of assorted sizes, Hungarian horse-soldiers from neck to waist, Russian infantry to the soles of their boots— splendidly decked out and hemmed in as all this. Mr. Novella can still crack a joke with his faithful pit about the Novello profile, is still recognisably our Ivor, showing off a bit in company, perhaps, but ever so nice, really. You could tell, if you didn't know, by the cathedral scene at the end, with the naughty monarch kneeling as he gives up his throne to daddy's dear little boy, and all the sweet sadness of exile in the strings, and the loss of a good woman's love. It wouldn't last a week on Broadway ? I know. But for a year or so, I am sure, the Danube will go on flowing down Shaftesbury Avenue replenished, from the Palace on its right bank, by a nightly tributary of tears.
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