File:Plays and players, leaves from a critic's scrapbook (1916) (14746546386).jpg

Identifier: playsplayersleav00eato (find matches)
Title: Plays and players, leaves from a critic's scrapbook
Year: 1916 (1910s)
Authors: Eaton, Walter Prichard, 1878-1957
Subjects: Theater Actors, American Actresses, American
Publisher: Cincinnati, Stewart & Kidd Company
Contributing Library: The Library of Congress
Digitizing Sponsor: The Library of Congress

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lly got nothing out of it except aheadache. HOLDING THE MIRROR UP TO ART The Show Shop—Hudson Theater,Decetnber 15, IQ14 The Show Shop, by James Forbes, author ofThe Chorus Lady, The Traveling Salesman andother comedies, has been produced at the HudsonTheatre, where for many years Mr. Forbes was thepress agent, and it is pleasant to report that it isnot only the best play Mr. Forbes has yet written,but one of the cleverest, brightest, most satisfyingplays displayed on Broadway this season. In fact,it is so good that it almost restores a lagging faithin the American theatre. It is acted as well as it iswritten, and the whole production might come fromVienna without a blush. The Show Shop is somewhat difficult to classify. It constantly skates the line between satiric comedy and burlesque, never in its burlesque losing sight, however, of its legitimate story, yet never in the telling of that story forgetting its burlesque purpose. At once too kindly and too farcical to be called an 82
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HOLDING THE MIRROR UP TO ART 83 out-and-out satire of theatrical life, it constantlypokes such delicious fun at this life that it cannotbe classed with Pineros Trelawney of the Wells,where a romantic element after all prevailed.Moreover, The Show Shop is complicated by anovel act containing a play within the play, cleverlywoven into the story. In Mr. Forbes other come-dies he has tried to pass from the comic to the serious(as in The Chorus Lady) and achieved only crudesentimentality. His transitions were like those ofa poor singer from one register to another. But inthis latest work he has tried for no changes of mood,cutting his work all of a piece, writing it all in thesame spirit of kindly burlesque, and the result ishappy artistic unity. For once we have an Ameri-can play, so American that it would almost call fora glossary, which we could yet show to a cultivatedEuropean without a single blush of apology. The first act is laid in a theatrical managers officein New York, the secon

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