HAVE been afflicted for several semesters with a severe pain in the rear of the neck. This arises from clatter I am forced to listen to from the region bordering on 42d Street and Broadway in a prominent Eastern city. It has to do with the moans which indicate that theatrical road shows are a thing of the past.

For the last few years I have been endeavoring, with a skill considered-in other connections-next to uncanny, to book shows in the wonderful Western city of, let us say, Albuquerque, N. M. My results have been remarkable. Remarkable in that after two years I have booked no and no/100 shows in Albuquerque, N. M.

When, as a young man of exuberance should, I have asked why Albuquerque, N. M., has been so slighted, I am informed many things. Among other things I am told that the road-show business in the United States has been practically wiped out because the smaller cities have turned to the worship of new idols-yclept movies, radio, etc. To which I answer with three large snorts and a disgusted sneeze. The truth being, of course, that the smaller cities of the hinterland are starved to the point of anamia from the lack of legitimate amusement, and are simply convulsed with the desire to pour their money into the Broadway coffers for anything at all that has a set of scenery and two principals who are able to talk the native tongue. Particularly are they anxious to enrich the venturesome gentlemen who bring them a show with music and dancing and pulchritude.

But, say the gentlemen, who in the name of Job can afford to put out a road show, with railroad fares and union rules and equity contracts what they are? VOL. LXXXII.—4

Who can make any money on the road when the company electrician bears in his contract a provision that he must travel in a lower berth? Who can take out a musical show when chorus girls who once were paid ten dollars a week and found will not go out unless they receive seventy-five weekly and a special maid?

The obvious answer to this is that somebody is lopsided and I'm not the party. I say this because there are road shows that continue to make money, and waste no time complaining about it. They go about it a little differently, true enough, but that only goes to prove my point-that what the theatrical profession lacks is a small portion of what they all think they have an abundance of: to wit, brains.

For instance, three years ago the Ruth St. Denis Dancers played matinée and night in Albuquerque. Listen to this very carefully. They grossed $2,771.81 at night and $1,200 at the matinée, a total of $3,971.81 for the day. And this in a punk little theatre seating 888, counting every last rotten balcony seat and every box seat. And still I hear plaints that the road doesn't want legitimate shows any more. Earlier in the year Geraldine Farrar grossed $2,300 for one performance at the same house at lower prices.

But these are not "theatrical" shows. They are sold as concert attractions. It's the one big laugh the regular show people can't seem to appreciate. If St. Denis in a highbrow dancing show in which not a word is spoken can gross $3,971.81 in a town the size of Albuquerque and in a theatre the size of the one we have, what in the name of sense could a real fastmoving musical show with a headliner do?

The St. Denis company had twelve dancers, including Miss St. Denis and Ted Shawn. It also carried a chamber orchestra of four men, a stage carpenter,

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effect that the young gentlemen knocked them over. And there, ladies and gentlemen, it seems to me, is the secret of the conquest of the road. Why try to drag around a flock of worn-out show girls when the stages of the hinterland haven't room for them anyhow? A good small chorus, a small orchestra, three or four jokes, and a few good principals to work them over-and the road show can take a laugh at the railroads and the Pullman company and salt away something substantial every Saturday night. I don't believe there is the slightest doubt about

it.

I say it can be done even under the old system of booking road shows and without taking into consideration certain things I am going to bring out a little later in this article. I say it can be done even with a knowledge of the terrible human beings the New York booking managers have to deal with in the small towns. They are, I'll admit, awful. I speak now of the local managers, who in addition to being stupid are also apt to be maliciously and deep-seatedly prejudiced against the road show from business

reasons.

Either the small-town manager owns the only opera-house in the city, or he controls the legitimate house-keeping it closed-and operates it in connection with a movie-house which is very much open. If he owns the sole show-house, it is used also for movies and cannot be secured except on off nights. That means that holidays and Saturdays and Sundays in the West-are dead in that house so far as road shows are concerned. If he owns the movie-house and also the only legitimate theatre, he is secretly just as pleased when the road show either flops or gets discouraged and never comes. If the road show does venture out and happens to drag the hungry theatre-goer into the barn despite all the local manager can do in the way of poor exploitation, the local mistake can take his 30 per cent of the gross and count it a good night. He can't lose. When the legitimate house is dark, it is certain that the movie-house is bright. When the legitimate house is bright with a courageous road show, the local manager is bound to get something out of it, and every nickel he takes away

from the hard-working road company is so much velvet.

The preparations the local manager makes to massacre the poor road show are enough to make the gods laugh. He sends down the janitor to take a few dabs at the dust that has been accumulating over everything for the past six months. The cover is taken off the jangling piano, and that part of the entertainment is cared for. The interior of the house has the delicious odor of an abandoned warehouse, and only the most innocent patron would think of wearing his best clothes for the evening of enjoyment. The wise would come outfitted in overalls and jumpers and fur coats, for it is not thought particularly sensible by the management to waste money on coal for an engagement that can't possibly amount to anything. If there is any one thing legitimate theatrical entertainment requires it is the glamour of the theatre, and a road-show performance under present conditions has all the glamour of a coroner's inquest in the basement of the city hall.

The op'ry-house may be open only four times a year, and may be eating itself to death with taxes and depreciation, but an individual who undertakes to present attractions on his own behalf will find himself confronted with a rent that will make him think he is trying to buy out the Metropolitan on a night when Marion Talley is singing. The small towns are ripe for a revolt that will bring them legitimate entertainment, but chances for results are small until they awake to the fact that the smug, smiling local manager who stands in the lobby of his movie-house and rubs his hands at the line outside is also the gentleman who is determined that they shall never see a real flesh-and-blood actor or actorine unless the notable's car should happen to break down on a motor trip through. When the small town gets wise to him, and when Broadway gets wise to itself, Albuquerque and the rest of them are going to get their first peep at the "drammer" as New York sees it.

Which brings us back to Broadway, and gets me on to a favorite subject: the theatrical advance man. When I speak of the theatrical advance man, I feel like

apologizing to the local manager. When I speak of both of them in comparison with anything else, I think that Clarence Darrow is all wrong about capital punishment. But I confine myself now to the advance man.

He is supposed to be more or less in the nature of a genius and is expected to come along just far enough in advance of the troupe to get the local manager out of the doldrums. The manager in El Paso was telling me of a man out ahead of Paul Whiteman two years ago. Did he have any new publicity stuff to help the manager out with? No, he hadn't, but he'd get him some. He'd write it himself, b'gosh. And he did-one dissertation on the fact that Paul made Victor records and was formerly at the Palais Royal. He gave one story which was to do for three El Paso papers, and disappeared.

It isn't an isolated case. I once met a train bearing a concert company, with the expectation of meeting the company manager and getting details straightened out that he wouldn't deign to answer by wire. I failed in trying to pick him out of the crowd. All I could see was the star standing by his bags at the foot of the car steps, trying to count the pieces and get the members of the company to hotel buses without losing any of them. The company manager, I found, was up at the hotel taking a bath when the rest of the company landed. He was, from then till the show left, always the last man to be found. The company finally departed minus a bull-fiddle which reposed in its case resembling the crating for a steamroller and was there three days later before they thought to wire and get it out of the clutches of the janitor of our theatre who evidently thought it was the base for a proposed monument to David Belasco and hadn't considered it worth mentioning to us.

Which is only slightly better than the company which arrived in Albuquerque minus the wooden leg of the star, although said limb was the crux of the whole dramatic opus. How some companies ever get back to New York alive under the guidance they are intrusted to is one eternal mystery to me.

I hope you're not sitting there expecting me to offer something to cure this

terrible state of affairs. I'm just a smalltown boy. I wouldn't think of trying to advise the young Broadway gentlemen who look on us yokels as something about as important as a palm-leaf fan in a cyclone. But the solution, in my view-if you insist on it—is the guarantee system such as is used by concert artists. If an agent can go out and sell Ruth St. Denis on a guarantee, he could surely do the same with, say, Ed Wynn's "Grab Bag." Pavlowa went traipsing all over the country for years with a company as big as a circus and didn't seem to miss any meals from poverty. And when you come right down to it, dear readers, this ballet stuff isn't what it's cracked up to be with the men folks. One ballet is about a ten years' plenty for most of them.

As a matter of fact the thing I'm speaking of has been started without the Broadway wisecrackers noticing it. While they have been bewailing the fact that business was poor in Akron, rotten in Oshkosh, and almost extinct in Sapulpa, the concert managers have been reaching up and snatching away their choice headliners as concert attractions. Charles L. Wagner was the first to realize the trend of theatrical affairs. It was he who weaned Will Rogers away from the Ziegfeld Follies and plumped him down on a bare concert stage. Will's tour of 192526 was one of the sensations of the concert stage. Supported by the De Reszke singers, Will packed some of the biggest auditoriums in the land. He packed them on his first appearance and left them howling for a second. Last year, Mr. Wagner let it be known, it was only a question of selecting the best route. When Will sailed from New York on a five months' trip abroad in an effort to alleviate the foreign debt burdens with part of the gravy of his late tour, he said that Broadway would see him in the future only for very brief periods. His only New York appearance last year was in Carnegie Hall. Real wealth for the artist is on the "road," as it has always been, but it took Charles L. Wagner and Will Rogers to prove it to the Wise Boys.

The thing has such immense possibilities that Elsie Janis has succumbed to it

-also under the guidance of Mr. Wagner. She will be assisted by Robert Steel, baritone of the Chicago Civic Opera; Carolina Lazzari, operatic contralto, and Lauri and Daisy Kennedy, but it will be the same knock-out Elsie Janis act with which she has mopped up for years in vaudeville and in musical shows. The endeavor of Miss Janis may operate to set the theatrical big guns thinking. If the concert stage is going to join with the movies in taking away the big names of vaudeville and the legitimate stage, it will be necessary for steps to be taken. The Broadway gents may be forced to the realization that the road is still worth something to them after all.

Paul Whiteman realized it and was wise enough to turn his back on Broadway and escort his band into the sticks for two long seasons. The receipts from his concerts were enormous and in addition he had the unalloyed pleasure of seeing his phonograph-record sales leap to new proportions. Where he had formerly been a New York star and a name, he was now a distinct personage and a drawing attraction of great power. He did that because he had the nerve to desert New York at the height of his fame. The great city has consequently seen little of him since, and there will undoubtedly be New Yorkers in abundance to tell you blithely of orchestras so far beyond Whiteman's as to be apologetic about it. The profit, however, will all be on Paul's side. With the United States supporting him, he can afford to wiggle a derisive thumb at Broadway.

What Broadway has neglected to discover is that it isn't necessary to have a regular theatre for a regular show. Pavlowa for years led her enormous company around the farm-circuit and probably played less than half of her engagements in theatres. What she did use were large public auditoriums. There, my dear, patient friends, is the nub of the whole thing! Every city of any consequence nowadays has a civic auditorium. Either that or a high-school or college auditorium. Where a theatre of highly respectable size will seat 1,200, an auditorium will rarely seat less than 2,000, and more often will have capacity of at least 3,500. There are literally hundreds of such pub

lic halls in towns you couldn't find on a map. And, oh! what a difference those few thousand seats make in the boxoffice check-up!

Broadway says the road is dead and gone to return no more. In answer to which Chaliapin forms his own opera company for a tour in the "Barber of Seville," and has a year's booking almost a year in advance. He asks-and seemingly gets the modest sum of $8,000 for one performance. In the face of all the wails that surround him, Frank T. Kintzing forms the Manhattan Opera company with Tamaki Miura as the star, assisted by a full company and orchestra and the Pavley-Oukrainsky ballet, and sells dates so fast his head swims.

The "road" has been dying for years, say the Broadway entrepreneurs, and all the while Fortune Gallo with his San Carlo Opera company has been building something which closely resembles his first name. He starts with a short season in New York-principally for the prestige of it, I suppose and then disappears into the wilds with his troupe. Before he disappears, however, he has booked his entire trip in advance, most of the engagements to fairly healthy guarantees backed by the wealth of the best people in strange-sounding towns you have never heard of.

There is one Broadway manager who still has faith in the road. I refer to George C. Tyler, who, several years ago, sent out an all-star company in "The Rivals," headed by Mrs. Fiske. It was a resounding success because Mr. Tyler used his head in fashioning a new idea. It consisted in sending Mr. Clayton Hamilton several weeks in advance of the company to lecture before women's clubs and civic organizations. It was a new idea and it worked admirably. So admirably that Mr. Tyler could keep out his expensive company for two years, and break theatre records in many parts of the country. But even with that example before them the Wise Boys of Gotham refused to wake up.

I say nothing here of the regular concert artists who have for years been reaping the small-town harvest. John McCormack, for example, asks and gets a