Putnam patriot., 1929-08-01

or the breclan theatre, forgot the heat and the season in the magic of the music under the stars of a per feet evening.
 1t was little cruel of the conduct or to place Mir. Gershwin's new com position directly after the Debussy number. Mir. Gershwin's whimsical merriment lost Q little from the ex- quisite poetry of the "Fetes."
 Of the modern American compos- CTS, We like Mr. Gershwin the best. He is frankly and unashamedly a composer of the jazz age. He has taken the implement at hand and fashioned something of it that is en- tertaining. amusing, good music and interesting. His new orchestral eff fort, "An American in Paris" is not so sound or so well-rounded a compo- sition as the now well established Rhapsody in Blue" It has many barren moments and there are periods when the nearer is quite convinced that whatever was happening to this particular American in Paris might just as well have happened to him in Minneapolis or Keokuk in Iowa. Ac- cording to the composer this Ameri- can awakes on gay Paris morning and starts out a-walking. He stops here and there and his course is ire quentiy interrupted by the incessant blasts of the ubiquitous Paris taxi with it's squonking horn. Then there is quiet moment where he stops for an aperatif. Later, after another walking theme. he reaches the gave ties of Montmartre and here he is as- sailed by the "blues," appropriately introducing the sort of theme in which Mir. Gershwin is most at home. But finally Paris captures him again and once more with final walking theme, the American goes jauntily hemeward.
 Tn every movement of his body, Mir. van Hoogstraten showed his hk- ing fer the Gershwin composition His orchestra. however, hampered him. The strings walled in the "blues," it is true, but they walled politely, mechanically. It was the wall of an orchestra in Frankfort ann Main playing jazz rather peeyish- iy. When. in the blues" theme, tho bass horn was called into play, nc supple syncopation of Mir. van Hcog- straten's baton could persuade the horn-player that he was not interpret ing the heavy gallumping of the late Fafner dragged out of "Rheingold' into a giddy Latin capital. It was all rather disappointing. Naturally when the opening blasts of the bat tery of taxi horns was introduced into the first bars of the score, the au- dience was delighted. But on the who e, the orchestra lost the merri- ment cf the composition. The fault was not Mir. van Hoogstraten's nN was it Mir. Gershwin's. The compost ton remained what it Is, an inter esting and amusing item in MT. Gershwin's career if not another rung in his compositional ladder.
 "Show cirl'
 A few nights after this particular stadium concert we again heard An American in Paris" incorporated this time into the latest Ziegfeld effort, the new revue "Show Girl" present ed at the Ziegfeld Theatre as a star ring vehicle for the current Mrs. Al Jolson, whose stage name is Ruby Keeler. We are convinced that some thing has happened to the Ziegfeld genius. All the color of other Zieg- field efforts is present in this revue. Al the well-known stage discipline, the very, very beautiful glorified young ladies and trio of comedians which has set the town a-talking. Yet we found the whc,e melange furnish ing cne of the dullest evenings we have ever spent in the theatre. We may be gibbeted for heresy in saying that we have never seen or heard three more boresome comedians than Clayton, Jackson & Durante. Of these three. the last named, one greasy-faced Durante is the shining card. It may have been the heat, 1t may have been the general dullness of the evening that clouded our vi- sion but Mir. Durante bored us to tears and we were delighted when he and his equally second-rate com panions were in the wines and of the stage. As for Mrs. Jolson she IS come'y and shapely and her tap-danc- ing. if you like tap-daneing, as the man said about the mountains Of Switzerland, is expert We don't like tap-dancing. Mrs. Jolson's voice has the gentle rasping quality of a cross cut saw going through a line knot and her comedy efforts throughout the evening consisted almost entirely in saying with varying intieeticns: "Yeahl Yeah? Yeahw Sometimes 1t got a laugh. As to what happened to the very amusing booss of Show Girl' in the course of the libretto, it is difficult to tell. Certainly it was lost on the way tc the stage.
 But of all Mir. Ziegfe.d's sins in this production We take him to task most of all for what he has called an in- terpretation of An American in Paris" It happens, that MT. Gersh- win and his composing abilities have dcne not little for Ziegfeld produc- tions in the past even as he has for those our own Mir. Freedley and he little deserves the complete messing up in the name of Terpsichore of his latest orchestral effort. Whoever staged the dance must never have heard the music before and certainly he had never been any nearer Co Paris than Baylcn. l.. l. Young women in odd pink costumes posed, writhed, darted here and there. An impossi- be young man who ought to be sell ing neckties sang the "blue" theme and sang it terribly to incomprehen- sible words and the huge Ziegfeid or chasfra nlaved tho compogiti0n just