Sherlock Holmes couldn't find a plot in "Stop! Look! Listen!" the new Irving Berlin revue at the Globe. In comparison, "Watch Your Step" was a novel by Alexandre Dumas. This libretto merely pieces together some lively vaudeville, with tunes and ideas from Berlin, each scene being but preamble to a song, and each song preface to the particular "stunt" it introduces. To me, with the weakness already confessed, the piece suffers from general absence of destination, and from a considerable superfluity of articulate chorus girls. But I am a minority, and worse than that, I have lost my enthusiasm for legs.
Certainly there is no gainsaying the liveliness—the appropriate term, I believe, is "pep"—of "Stop! Look! Listen!" or the number of clever people and things in the performance. Foremost among the former are Harry Fox, who never appeared to better advantage, and a very interesting dance team, known to the varieties as Doyle & Dixon. Then there are Tempest & Sunshine; Blossom Seeley; Joseph Santley, also at his best; Helen Barnes, giving promise in her first part; and Justine Johnstone, who represents the farina-pudding school of art. Finally, to obey the implied injunction that the first shall be last, there is Gaby Deslys. Mr. Fox tells The Lady of the Lilies, "I think you're clever," and Mr. Fox is entitled to his opinion, but it isn't ours. To us, Mile. Deslys always has seemed quite an ordinary French soubrette, full of gurgles, gasps and aspirations. Here, however, she does two rather remarkable dances—one with Mr. Santley and one with Harry Pilcer —and wears some astounding costumes, including a hat that looks as though its plumage had been lifted from a pink hearse.
Mr. Berlin's lyrics are characteristic. There is real humor in a chorus of men's dressmakers, who are "glad you left it all to Percy! Oh, Mercy!" One's nerves weren't prepared, however, for "Don't be nervous. I'm here at your service!" The Berlin music shows the effect of overproduction, lacking freshness and inspiration, but this doesn't keep successive audiences from succumbing to the syncopation. Everybody's doing it at "Stop! Look! Listen!" even though the composer may be overdoing it! Mr. Berlin's "stunts" are as ingenious and entertaining as ever. There is a song, "I Love a Piano," strikingly reminiscent of "Alexander's Rag-time Band," accompanied by eight men at as many pianos, the effect of which is not less striking because the thing was done at a Friars' Frolic. A Vogue cover opens and closes to show six beautiful girls in six
beautiful gowns; there is a cleverly contrived policeman's dance, programmed "The Law Must Be Obeyed;" and to take the place of the rag-time grand opera in "Watch Your Step," there is a rag-time melodrama.
R. H. Burnside's contribution to all this is some exceptionally interesting "business" and some attractive grouping. Ernest Albert and Homer Emens painted the two most wonderful of nine wonderful scenes, and the dresses, particularly those worn by the chorus in a song called "The Hula Hula," beggar description. Altogether, here is a quick and diverting entertainment, none the less sure of success because its words and music are not 'way above par.
At the Globe you must stop and look, but it isn't at all important that you listen![3]
