STAGE AND SCREEN The Theatre
"Follow the Sun." At the Adelphi- Theatre Mn. COCHRAN'S new revue concentrates its attack on the senses and ignores the wits. The scenery which Professor Ernst Stern has designed attests the expenditure of a vast amount of in- genuity, money, and red and purple paints, but not the recog- nition that magnificence is more effective in the theatre when 'combined with simplicity than when presented unadulterated. Mr. Cochran's Young Ladies seem to discard their dresses more frequently than ever before, but never put on anything which one remembers by the time the next scene is over. And what is clearly intended to be the piece de resistance of the evening, the scene devoted to Ciro Rumac's Rumbaland Muchaehos, does for our ears what the rest of the show does for our eyes, and unlooses a volume of brassy discords which tests physical endurance more than seems necessary in a piece -presumably designed to entertain.
The scenes in fact exist for the settings, not the settings for the scenes. Accordingly, the sketches are for the most part unprecedentedly brief. The curtain rises on an elaborate tableau of Hogarth's Strolling Actresses Dressing in a Barn, and in an instant falls again to give place to an equally elaborate companion-scene of dressing-rooms in a modern theatre : the point of the comparison seems too slight to support so much decorative bombast. And the same is roughly true of the other sketches, of which few have the power to stand out as more than incidents in a decorative scheme. By no means all of the material introduced is of a quality to cause much regret on the score of its submergence, but it is undoubtedly a pity that Miss Irene Eisinger should have been compelled to waste her charming voice in a very conventional little sketch about Mozart and an appalling scene, entitled " The Three Holy Kings," in which she poses in a blue tea-gown as the Madonna. Miss Claire Luce is almost alone in being able to assert herself successfully in her surroundings, and the scenes in which she appears, whether to dance or to sing, contain between them almost all the recognisable enter- tainment which this unfortunate show provides.
DEREK VEatsenovir..
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