“VAUDEVILLE IS DEAD"

Sun (Auckland), Volume IV, Issue 954, 23 April 1930, Page 12

“VAUDEVILLE IS DEAD"

AMERICAN PLAYWRIGHT'S VIEWS Special to THE SL -V WELLINGTON, Today. “Vaudeville in the United States is dead. The movies began it years ago and the talkies have finished it. The theatre is firmly- rooted m the large cities; but the smaller towns will suffer.*’ . .. r . This is the opinion given by .\n. Oscar Hammerstein, millionaire theatre-owner and playwright, who arrived in Wellington today on his wayback to the United States after a flying visit to Australia. Mr. Ham - merstein is probably the leading writer of musical plays in the United States, his latest successes being * Show Boat” and “The Desert Song.” What he thinks of the talkies may be gauged from the fact that at present he is living in Southern California making talkies himself. His trip to Australia was taken between finishing a picture and editing it. which will be his first task on arrival. “The talkies are now finding themselves,” he said. “There has been some uncertainty about them, but producers are learning what to do. For instance, I contemplated many outdoor scenes for my next film, and am now told by engineers that they can record outdoor scenes better than indoor scenes, whereas previously outdoor work was considered to present great difficulties. The talkies’ troubles have been those of a new medium, but they will evolve their own form as the silent films did before them. The great range of scene and fluid action is an enormous asset. In making versions of stage plays they will have to abandon the original structure in many ways and use their own strength to provide alternative methods of developing the production. They would, for instance, be foolish if they attempted to tell a story in no more than three scenes.”

Discussing his success, “The Desert Song,” Mr. Hammerstein said: “It all came out of Abdul Jvrim. You remember when the French were having a lot of trouble with him in Morocco. I conceived the scene as a good setting for a musical play, and then began to read books on Morocco. I found one book which was called ‘An American Among the RiffV which solved for me the problem of a RifC hero, as I learned there that a man had been able to live among the Riffs and be prominent in their life, and yet, it was claimed, pass as one of them. Then I introduced the Jekyll and Hyde idea and the rest was easy.”