The Devil's Playground: A Century of Pleasure and Profit in Times Square by James Traub Page B

Gershwin was writing and performing songs for the
Scandals;
and Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart were turning out tunes for the
Gaieties.
The
Music Box Revue
of 1923 featured comic skits by Kaufman and Robert Benchley, soon to be one of the famous wits of the Algonquin Round Table and
The New Yorker.
The Paul Whiteman Orchestra, one of the first of the great jazz bands, performed in the
Scandals.
    The revues of the twenties were immensely more urbane than those of an earlier generation; they were also several orders of magnitude naughtier. At
Earl Carroll’s Vanities,
by far the most shameless, hostesses in short skirts and sheer stockings danced with the customers, and show-girls were supplied to the better tables. The show itself adhered to the Ziegfeld principle of “nothing but girls,” with seminude or thinly draped chorines posed, according to one authority, “against plume curtains, hanging gardens, gates of roses, swings, ladders, bejewelled ruffles, chandeliers, horns of plenty, the prehistoric, the futuristic . . . ,” and so on. The Shuberts featured nude girls as lights in a chandelier and as fruits in a fruit basket. The skits were often just as transparent as the costumes. The Keith-Albee syndicate, which controlled many of the acts, eventually drew up a lengthy list of taboos, which included the stock joke of a girl walking onstage carrying an oar and announcing, “I just made the crew team.” The 1923 edition of the show
Artists and Models
featured women nude from the waist up disporting themselves as “models.” The market for sexual candor finally became so glutted that Ziegfeld himself began putting the clothes back on the girls. “This was not a moral standpoint on my part,” as the Olympian one explained in a 1927 magazine article, “but an artistic one. I realized that a charming girl will not appear in public undressed.”
    A play like
Dulcy
could not have been presented on Broadway in an earlier age, both because sardonic wits like George S. Kaufman weren’t writing for the stage—or perhaps didn’t yet exist at all—and because the audience wasn’t ready for such pitiless debunking. Everything made on Broadway, whether cafés or signs or plays, was, and still is, made with an audience in mind; and the audience of 1910 got the fun-loving but formulaic theatrical experience it craved. But the new generation, disgusted with received wisdom—and much enjoying its disgust with received wisdom —signaled an almost unlimited willingness to be challenged. The essayist and critic and wit-about-town Alexander Woollcott, who himself served in World War I and then lived briefly in Paris, along with many of the leading columnists and editors of his generation, observed in 1920 that “there has grown up an alert, discriminating, sophisticated public, numerous enough at last to make profitable the most aspiring ventures of which the theater’s personnel is capable.”
    The bohemians of Greenwich Village had long scorned the overtly commercial culture of Times Square; but in 1918 a group of sophisticates from the Village established the Theatre Guild in order to bring serious English and continental drama to Broadway. In 1920, at a time when George Bernard Shaw was considered a rank immoralist both here and in England—he had condemned World War I as brutish militarism—the Theatre Guild mounted a famous and immensely successful production of Shaw’s
Heartbreak House
on Broadway. The Guild staged Ibsen’s
Peer
Gynt
and Strindberg’s
Dance of Death,
and virtually everything of Shaw’s, as well as works by serious American and English writers like Sidney Howard and S. N. Behrman and A. A. Milne. Most of these works, presented in a spirit of brave artistic purity, found a Broadway audience. By 1925, the Guild had built its own theater, on West 52nd Street, and had traveling companies both here and in London; the Guild was supported by thirty thousand subscribers in New York, and thirty thousand