Word: plotting
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Roberta (adapted by Otto Harbach from Alice Duer Miller's Gowns by Roberta, score by Jerome Kern; Max Gordon, producer) is another gallant try at making a handsome, funny and affecting play with music and dancing, girls and dresses. Plot: a U. S. college boy loses his girl because she thinks he is "small-town." To forget her, he visits his Aunt Minnie (Fay Templeton) who is Roberta, a famed Paris dressmaker. Planning to will her establishment to her assistant, a onetime Russian princess (Tamara), Aunt Minnie dies without signing the will, thus forcing her nephew-heir to turn...
...Footlight Parade" seems to suffer from a comparison with "Forty Second Street," or the golddigger balderdash. The plot is thin, the songs are only fair. Ruby Keeler, Joan Blondell, and James Cagney are adequate in their parts. But they show a superior attitude to all the implausible nonsense: It is not in good taste, nor is it just to the public if great artists are insincere. What deserve praise are the photography and the ensemble dances on such a large scale that, were he living, Ziegfeld would feel like a cheapskate if he saw them...
...plot deals both with gangsters and with prizefighters; consequently, it is pretty dull. Myrna Loy is the mistress of Otto Kruger, as the big-time crook and gambler, Willie Ryan. She meets Max Baer, whom she loves because "he is a big kid." In altruistic fashion, Ryan gives her up; naturally, she has her troubles with her boxer, since he is very healthy and cannot be satisfied with one woman. Nevertheless, the picture ends happily in a terrific match between Baer and Carnera, and in established love between the central couple...
...dividing line between drama and melodrama is an obscure one, and "Hazel Kirke," current offering of the Stagers, crosses and recrosses the line. Plot, situations, dialogue, all in the best tradition of the '80's and '90's, offer plenty of opportunities for burlesque, and the person who delights to laugh at over-emotional characterizations will be more than satisfied; yet there is an undercurrent of genuine feeling in the play which elicits a true emotional response from the audience...
...complicated plot includes a tender romance between a handsome lord and an innocent miller's daughter, a doubtful marriage, a father's curse, a self-sacrificing lover, an heroic halfwit, and-a happy ending. Flitting in and out of the story is Pittances Green, clown extraordinary, whose puns and drolleries, no less than his outlandish costumes, lighten the play tremendously. The versatile Phillip Bourneuf plays the part to perfection...