The Seven Lively Arts
Gilbert Seldes
The One-Man Show
(p. 177 - 188)
THE ONE-MAN SHOW
WHEN all the other grave aesthetic questions
about the stage are answered, some profound theorist may explain the existence of the one-man show.
Since I am not a materialist, I cannot concede the obvious solution--that a man finds enough money to
produce himself in a Broadway show-because there is
something attractive and mysterious about this type of
entertainment which the explanation fails to explain.
The theory of the one-man show is apparently
that there are individuals so endowed, so versatile,
and so beloved, that no other vehicle will suffice to
let them do their work. Conversely, that they are of
such quality that they suffice for the strange entertainment with which they are surrounded and that
nothing else matters provided they are long and frequent on the stage. Six men and two women are in
the first roster of the one-man show: Fred Stone, Ed
Wynn, Raymond Hitchcock, Eddie Cantor, Frank
Tinney, and Al Jolson; below them, leading the
women, Elsie Janis and Nora Bayes. And omitting
Jolson because he is so great that he cannot be put in
any company, the greatest one-man show was one in
which none of these appeared--it was one in which
even the man himself didn't appear. It was a show
in which one man succeeded where all of these, this
time not excluding Jolson, had failed: for he made
the whole production his kind of show--and the
others have never quite managed to do more than
make themselves.
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The chief example of this failure is Hitchcock,
whose series lapses ever so often, leaving him stranded
on the bleak shore of a Pin Wheel Revue--an
artistic, an intellectual, an incredibly stupid production which Hitchy manfully tried first to save and
then to abandon. There were in the better Hitchy
shows other first-rate people: one who masqueraded
as Joseph Cook and was none other than Joe Cook
the Humorist out of vaudeville and out of his element; Ray Dooley was with Hitchy, I believe, and
there were always good dancers. Hitchy kept on the
stage a long time, as conferencier and as participant,
and his amiable drollery was always at the same
level--just enough. He never quite concealed the
strain of making a production go; one always wanted
to be much more amused, and Hitchy never got beyond the episode of the Captain of the Fire Brigade
or trying to buy the middle two-cent stamp in a sheet
of a hundred. A series of vaudeville sketches doesn't
make a one-man show, even if he plays in all of them;
and the moment Hitchcock was off, Hitchy-koo went
to pieces, some good and some bad, and all trying a
little too hard to be something else.
Eddie Cantor and Al Jolson appear in the two
different Winter Garden types of show--the Jolson
and the Winter Garden in impuris naturalibus. Jolson infuses something both gay and broad into his
pieces; even the recurrence of Lawrence D'Orsay can
not win back the original Winter Garden atmosphere
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and even the disappearance of Kitty Doner cannot
diminish Jolson's private quality. Of the straight
Winter Garden shows, the 1922 with Eddie Cantor
was the best in ten years, made so by Cantor and
made by him, in spite of the billing, into a one-man
show. The nervous energy of Cantor isn't sufficient
to animate the active, but indifferent choruses of the
Shuberts. One thing, however,
he can do superbly--the lamb led
to the slaughter. It is best when
he chooses to play the timid,
Ghetto-bred, pale-faced Jewish
lad, seduced by glory or the prospects of pay into competing with
athletes and bruisers. One thing he cannot do and
should learn not to try--the blackface song and comedy of his master, Jolson. The scenes of violence
vary; that of the osteopath was an exploitation of
meaningless brutality; I cared for nothing after
Eddie's frightened entrance, "Are you the Ostermoor?" But the aviation examination and the application for the police force were excellent pieces
of construction, holding sympathy all the way
through and keeping on the safe side of nausea. Both
of these were before the Winter Garden days and
the Winter Garden exploit was better than either.
He played here a cutter in a hand-me-down clothing
store and it was his function to leap into the breach
whenever a customer showed the slightest tendency
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to leave without buying a suit. The victim was obsessed by some idea of having "a belt in the back"
and was forced into sailor suits and fancy costume
and was generally made miserable. Eddie's terrific
rushes from the wings, his appeals to God to strike
him dead "on the spot" if the suit now being tried
on wasn't the best suit in the world, his helplessness
and his, "Well, kill me, so kill me, as apology when
his partner revealed the damning fact that that happened to be the man's old suit-all of this was worth
the whole of the Potash-Perlmutter cycle. And the
whole-heartedness of Cantor's violence-essentially
the bullying of a coward who has at last discovered
some one weaker than himself, was faultless. He
sings well the slightly suggestive songs like After the
Ball (new version), and his three broken dance steps
with the sawing motion of his gloved hands create an
image exceedingly precise and palpable. There is
in him just enough for the one-man show, but so far
it has been limited by his tendency to imitate and by
failure to develop his own sources of strength. Even
in Kid Boots he just fails to make the grade.
The one-man show requires its leader to leave
nothing in himself unexploited--there is too much for
him to do and he must take everything on himself
the requirements are exactly opposite to those of the
vaudeville act where the actor must work in the briefest compass, with the utmost concentration, and get
his effects in the shortest time. Frank Tinney's suc-
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cess in vaudeville marks the limitations of his success
in his shows--for he imposed on vaudeville that languid easy-going manner of his and was just enough
out of vaudeville tempo (he is very deceptive in this)
to appear to be a novelty there. In essence he isn't
a good one-man, for his line is limited and his humour and his good
humour (in which he is matched
only by Ed Wynn) are not capable of the strain of a long winter's
evening entertainment. Tinney
was excellent in a quarrel scene
with Bernard Granville (in a Ziegfeld Follies, I think) the two pacing in opposite directions, the
width of the stage between them,
always from footlights to backdrop
and never crossing the stage; he
was disputatious and entertaining
on the negative of the proposition
that the Erie railroad (pronounced
for reasons of his own, Ee-righ)
is a very expensive railroad; his
appearance in Watch Your Step
was almost perfect. (Consult Mr A. Woollcott's
Shouts and Murmurs for everything about Tinney;
Mr Woollcott's descriptions are accurate and evocative and he errs only in his estimate of Tinney's quality.) Tinney has everything except the
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excess of vitality, the surcharge of genius. He has
method nearly to perfection and it is a wholly original,
ingratiating, and, up to a certain point, adaptable
method. What he has done is to destroy the "good
joke," for all of Tinney's jokes are bad ones and he
gets his effect by fumbling about with them, by
lengthening the preliminaries, by false starts, erasures, corrections--until his arrival at the point relieves the suspense. I have heard him take at least
ten minutes to put over: "Lend me a dollar for a
week, old man.-Who is the weak old man?" and not
a moment was superfluous. He is expert at kidding
the audience, and as he is never in character he never
steps out. 'There isn't quite enough of him, that
is all.
There is enough of Fred Stone for versatility and
not enough for specific personal appeal. As acrobat,
dancer, ventriloquist, and cut-up Stone is easily in
the lead; but the unnamable quality is lacking. See
him climbing up an arbour to meet his Juliet in the
balcony; he is discovered, hangs head downward in
peril of his life, seizes a potted flower and with it
begins to dust the vines--it is Chaplinesque in conception and beautifully executed. See him on the
slack rope continually on the point of falling off
and continually recovering and seeming to hang on
by his boot toe; or in The Lady of the Slipper making a beautiful series of leaps from chair to divan,
from divan to table, to a triumphant exit through the
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unsuspected scenery; or in another quality recall the
famous "Very good, Eddie," of Chin-Chin. He is
incredible; one wouldn't miss him
for worlds; yet it is always what
he does and not himself that constitutes the attraction. I wonder
whether I do not wrong him altogether by classing him with the
one-men, for it was always some
thing more than Montgomery and
Stone in the days of The Red Mill
and Stone does not exaggerate
himself on the stage. His command of attributes is greater than
that of any other player; he does
everything with a beautiful, error-less accuracy--and the pleasure of
seeing things exactly right, all the
time, is not to be underestimated.
It is Ed Wynn's pleasure to
make everything seem utterly haphazard. Wynn is absurd in the
theatre--there is always something left unresolved in
reducing him to the lowest term, and he is incommensurable because there are no standards for him and no
similars. I prefer to see him wandering through a good
revue, changing hats, worrying about a "rewolwer"
in the first scene and stopping dead in the twentieth
to declare that it wasn't a "rewolwer" at all, but a pis-
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tol. When he came to put on a one-man show he
preserved the best part of this incoherence. He made
it his business to appear before a drop curtain and
explain in an amazing vocabulary and with pains
taking gravity exactly what was to occur in the next
scene. He affects to be awkward (to quote him, I
might go so far as to call him uncouth. . . . I think
I will call him uncouth. . . . He is uncouth) ; his
gestures are florid and wide, his earnestness makes all
things vivid. Each of these explanations involves a
bad pun and none, of course, has anything to do with
the scene that actually follows. Like Jolson and
Cantor, he takes the stage at a given moment and
entertains. His famous inventions seemed to be the
crudest form of humour--a typewriter carriage for
eating corn on the cob, a burning candle to set in one's
ears in order to wake up in time--yet sheer ebullition carried them high into the field of "nice, clean
fun." Wynn's words come tumbling out of him, agglutinated, chaotic, disorderly; he is abashed by his
own occasional temerity, he is timid and covers it
with brashness-and all of this is a carefully created
personage; it is not Ed Wynn. He has found a
little odd corner of life which no one else cultivates;
it is a sort of rusticity in the face of simple things;
he is a perpetual immigrant obsessed by hats and
shoes and words and small ideas, instead of bothering
about skyscrapers. The deepness of his zanylike
appreciation of every-day things is the secret of his
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capacity for making them startling and funny. His
one fault is the show with which he surrounds him
self.
I have never seen Elsie Janis better than she was
in The Lady of the Slipper--with the exception of
Gaby Deslys I have never seen any woman comparable to Miss Janis in that piece, and in it she had
qualities which ought to have made her appearance in
an individual show a much greater success than it actually turned out to be. For, except a voice, Miss
Janis has everything. She is a beautiful dancer and
her legs are handsomer than Mistinguett's, and she is
the finest mimic I have ever seen on the stage, several
shades ahead of Ina Claire. An exceptional intelligence operates in the creation of these caricatures,
for they are all created by seizing upon vital characteristics of tone, gesture, tempo of movement, spirit;
and the arrangement of her hair and the contortions
of her face are only guide-signs to the accomplished
act. She is herself of an abounding grace, a suppleness of body and of mind, and the measure of her
skill is the exact degree in which her grace and simplicity are transformed into harshness or angularity
or sophistication as she passes one after another of
our stage personalities before her mirror. This year
I saw her in a Paris music-hall take off Mistinguett
and Max Dearly. She presented them singing Give
Me Moonlight in their own imagined versions and
her throaty "Give me a gas light" for the creator of
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Mon Homme was superb. She offered to sing it, at
the end, as she herself ought to sing it--and danced
it without uttering a sound. It reminded one of Irene
Castle in Watch Your Step. For an exact calculation of her capacities and a sensible, modest intention
to stay within them and to exploit them to the limit
are parts of Elsie Janis's intelligence. To be sure, it
isn't her intelligence--it is her loveliness and her
talent that endear her to us. But it is grateful, for
once in a way, to find a talent so great, a loveliness
so irresistible, joined to an intelligence which sets all
in motion and spoils nothing.
I suspect that in spite of the best of the one-man
shows there is something wrong with the idea--perhaps because the environment requires more than any
man has yet been able to give. And the one perfect
example is, as I have suggested, proof of this. Because Stop! Look! Listen! which was only a moderate success on Broadway and involved the talents of
Gaby Deslys, Doyle and Dixon, Harry Fox, Tempest
and Sunshine, the beautiful Justine Johnston, Helen
Barnes, Helen Dryden as costumer and Robert McQuinn as scenic designer, a beautiful chorus and an
excellent producer, was actually the one-man show
of Irving Berlin. For once a complete and varied
show expressed the spirit of one man to perfection.
In that piece, Berlin wrote two of his masterpieces
and about four other superb songs; and, more than
that, suffused the entire production with the gay spirit
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of his music. There occurred The Ragtime Melodrama
danced by Doyle and Dixon--only the Common Clay
scene from the Cohan revue ever approached it, and
Doyle and Dixon never danced better (unless, possibly, a quarter of an hour earlier in The Hula
Hula); there was The Girl on the Magazine Cover,
perfectly set and costumed, a really good sentimental
song with its quaint introduction of Lohengrin (not
the Wedding March) ; there was When I Get Back to
the U. S. A. sung against a chorus of My Country,
'Tis of Thee; there was Gaby's wicked Take Off a
Little Bit and Harry Fox's Press-Agent Song--and
finally the second of Berlin's three great tributes to
his art: I Love a Piano, which, like the mother of
Louis Napoleon, he wrote for six pianos and in which
everything in syncopation up to that time was epitomized and carried to a perfect conclusion. What
ever was gay, light, colourful, whatever was accurate,
assured, confident, and good-humoured, was in this
miraculous production. I saw it twelve times in two
weeks--lured partly, I must confess, by the hope that
Harry Pilcer would break at least a leg in his fall
down the golden stairs. He never did; in spite of
which, seeing it again, months later, it still seemed
to me the apotheosis of pure show. I think I could
reconstruct every moment of it, including the useless
plot and Justine Johnston's ankles; it seems a pity
that all of it, the ephemeral and the permanent,
should have already passed from the stage. It was a
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beginning in ragtime operetta which Mr Berlin has
never followed up; his inexhaustible talents have been
diverted into other things; he is now a maker of revues. Yet when he saw The Beggar's Opera, Mr
Berlin felt something plucking at his sleeve, reminding him that it was his job, and his alone, to create
the comparable type for America.
At that moment he thought back to Stop! Look!
Listen!--but he had already begun to build the Music
Box--and we must wait patiently for what time
will bring as a real successor to his one-man show.
At any rate, we have had it. We know; now, what
it can amount to--and it is enough. Enough, at any
rate, to put the veritable one-man show fairly definitely out of the running.
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