Allan Dinehart and Co. (1).

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21 Mins.; Full Stage (Special Interior). Allan Dinehart may be the meanest man in the world, but it will be a long time before he manages to make anyone believe it is his present offering. Allan is a nice boy and it seems more or less of a pity that he shouldn’t manage to get an offering more fitted to his talents than the present piece. He is a comedian, pure and simple, and a comedian who can convince an audience in a serious scene is about as rare as a snow-ball at the equator. T present Mr. Dinehart is not of the type of actor classified as a rarity. He is handicapped in the matter of support, but that was an error that should have been rectified before the act was shown. “The Meanest Man in the World” is a lawyer who self-styles himself thus in order to convince himself that he can be a regular Simon Legree and wield the black snake over the small debtors of a large corporation evidently is one that deals in women’s wear at wholesale. One of the creditors is J. Hudson & Co., who conduct a small shop in Kingston N.Y. they owe the corporation $200. The meanest man in the world is sent to collect or to close the establishment. On his arrival in the little office at the back of the Hudson store he encounters what he believes to be the firm’s stenographer, but it isn’t the stenographer at all, she really is the whole of J. Hudson & Co. (the audience is in the secret all the time) but the meanest man wasn’t wise even though there wasn’t another soul in the store. He tells what a bad man he is and the supposed stenographer pleads for time for the firm, claiming there is to be an Old Home Week Celebration within a month and the shop will make enough during this period to take care of the indebtedness (but anyone who ever lived in Kingston and managed to get away could not be gotten back to the burg other than in a coffin). The meanest man finally awakes to the fact that the stenographer is really the whole firm and has softening of the heart and incidentally of the brain, telephones to New York and borrows enough to take care of the firm’s debt. He also learns that through some legal manipulation J., Hudson has been trimmed of $20,000, and he is about to start out to collect that for her, when the stenographer suddenly shows she is more interested in the meanest man than in the money and there is a happy curtain. The act will do as a feature turn on the small time.

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