Combe and Nevins, a two-man piano and singing turn, were confronted with the same difficulty, the late arrivals slamming down seats on them all through their act. The vocalist has a good tenor voice. The act should progress rapidly with experience.
Morris and Campbell, next to closing, did their regulation clean-up. It was a cinch that half the house knew the routine by heart, but that, didn’t matter in the least. It even helped Morris and Campbell’s hit, as many of the gags and most of the business were anticipated with laughs.
Irving and Jack Kaufman whopped things up for an explosion opening the second part. They are doing the same routine of harmonized numbers, as offered at the other Keith houses recently, with one exception. The Kaufmans have developed into metropolitan favorites in remarkably short space of time. Their act is real vaudeville of the standard variety.
It took quite a while for the show to get started Tuesday night, the first three turns falling in a row. Ben Bernie, fourth, finally succeeded in creating some real vaudeville atmosphere and the rest of the show just romped along for a series of consecutive applause wallops. Mr. Bernie has developed into a first rate monologist, the fiddling now being a secondary consideration. Preceding Bernie, Baroness De Hollub had taken a terrific flop, which made it all the harder for the kidding violinist. He had a lot to overcome but managed to win out with honors. A raft of encores and a “speech” attested Bernie’s hit.
Coming on at a rather late moment did not handicap Jim Toney and Ann Norman in capturing a solid score for themselves, with the result Jim had to show all he had even down to the encoring “knock-knee-dance.” Toney and Norman top in the lights and did not disappoint.
Dolly Kay opened after the intermission and sold her jazz stuff to hundred percent profits. Miss Kay’s zippy manner of delivery impresses from the start and the house us at her mercy thereafter. It is all pop material, familiar in the main, but ever compelling and novel by virtue of the soloist’s individuality.
[New Act] Arab Acrobatics, 6 mins; full. Usual Arab acrobatic turn with six men. However, an opportunity was offered at the Colonial act this week to get a line on the act that would have been difficult to imagine had the turn filled the place on the bill originally allotted to it. Instead of closing the show it appeared second, and the applause for the pyramid formations and the whirlwind acrobatics frequent.
Fred La France and Joe Kennedy in “The Party of the Second Part” (New acts) were a blackface hit. The act is running as smoothly as might be expected, but when it is once in real shape it will bring screams of laughter.
Following the acrobatics Ed Morton slipped over a fair sized hit with popular numbers leaning mostly to comedy stuff. “You Tell ‘Em,”his opener, got by nicely, a song about “Our Vestibule,” full of suggestion, was eaten up by the upper loft delegation, and “Onion Time in Bermuda” and “wedding Bell Blues,” the Latter with an arrangement of all the married woe songs of the past decade, both were surefire for him.
The running order of the bill was pretty much switched after the matinee, when Mme. Albertina Rasch (New Acts) was moved from No. 2 to closing the show. This move was undoubtedly a wise one, for that Colonial gallery never would have let a classical solo dancer get by, and undoubtedly the Rasch act would have been fair game for them. There is one thing and that is that the switching worked to the switching worked to the advantage of the Mizzan Troupe, for the Arab aggregation won frequent applause with pyramid formations and tumbling.
