DE WOLF HOPPER IS AT HIS BEST IN "WANG"

Those who, like the guileless Playgoer, go to "Wang" knowing nothing more about it than its percussive name, will find themselves in the midst of the creditor-dodging adventures of the wily but impecunious Regent of Siam. Perhaps it is unnecessary to add that the play contains nothing which will cause patriotic Siamese at Harvard to write indignant letters to the CRIMSON. A delightfully impossible potentate is pursued through two acts by mysterious, impossible emissaries of the King of Cambodia for the price of a most impossible elephant. As the potentate has not even enough credit left to pay off the messenger who brings a parcel for his bride, the extremities to which he is forced to evade the fearsome Cambodians, may be imagined. To round out the plot there is a French widow with a prodigious family of daughters and a treasure chest for the Crown Prince of Siam. Numerous officers and the Crown Prince himself take care of the daughters, and the Regent looks out for the treasure chest and incidentally, the window.

Music Explains Why of Jazz

The music, for the Regent through his many troubles possesses the gift of song, is pleasant. Some of the hits are distinctly good, -- particularly the Crown Prince's philosophical "A Pretty Girl", --and most, are well sung. The tunes carry you back to the man who used to sing "Where the River Shannon Flows" as he beat rugs in the back yard. They are pretty and melodious, but while not holding them to be directly the cause of the War, it is no libel to say that one has only to hear them to understand the why of jazz.

Opera Brings Back Musty Memories

So with the comic opera itself. There is no smell of camphor or mothballs about the stage, to be sure, but vivid visions of horse-cars, and bustles, and the Spanish War come to mind all the same. The gags are there to laugh at and undoubtedly present all the requisites of humor. At least they did thirty years ago. Yet if this is what the nineties found the height of the entertaining, it is not difficult to understand why the parents of today find it so hard to enjoy the ideas of the "present generation". But another thirty years and perhaps even the "Didn't-I-see-you-in-Buffalo" joke may have seen its best days.

Hopper is Wang's Raison d'Etre

But to discuss "Wang" without Wang himself is to publish a book with only the appendix. Gilbert and Sullivan's operas may go on regardless, but Wang will die with the retirement (let us hope not, for another thirty years) of De Wolf Hopper. Indeed if Hopper had not erected it to its "present perpendicular attitude" "Wang" would be already dead and happy in "innocuous desuetude." But Hopper gives the thing its, authority, as the Kentuckian said of the "corn" in the julep. When he is on (which happily is most of the time) whether to heap new polysyllabies on the head of his obtuse Semegambian followed, or to narrate before the curtain the tragic consequences of "The Wrong Flat", the audience laughs itself sick. When he is off, the play has as much freshness as is found in articles rummaged from grandmother's trunk in the attic.

Hopper holds his audiences in a way that is given only to geniuses. Which is to say that there are a great many people, and the Playgoer is one of them, who would prefer a play that tastes like day before yesterday's milk, provided De Wolf Hopper is in it, to the latest "Hit from Broadway". But it is speaking disrespectfully of things venerable to put "Wang" in such a class. In spite of its one-cylinder action its songs are often charming. And he would be a critical man who would not consider an evening well spent just to hear Hopper sing "The Man who had an Elephant on his hands".