More and more, the better producing managers--men like Hopkins, William Harris, Jr., Ames, _et al._--are coming to open their plays in New York “cold,” that is, without the former experimental performances in thitherward cities. And more and more, they are coming to realize to their sorrow that, unless New York supports these plays of the better sort, they can look for no support elsewhere. Chicago, boasting of its hospitality to sound artistic endeavour, spent thirty-five hundred dollars on a drama by Eugene O’Neill in the same week that it spent forty-five thousand dollars on Al Jolson’s Winter Garden show. Boston, one of the first cities to rush frantically forward with proofs of its old New England culture, has turned into a prompt and disastrous failure every first-rate play presented in its theatres without a widely advertised star actor during the last five years, and at the same time has made a fortune for the astute Mr. A. H. Woods, who, gauging its culture accurately, has sent it “Up in Mabel’s Room,” “Getting Gertie’s Garter,” and similar spicy boudoir and hay-mow farces, together with Miss Theda Bara in “The Blue Flame.” (It is no secret among the theatrical managers that the only way to bring the culture of Boston to the box-office window is through a campaign of raw advertising: the rawer the better. Thus the Boston Sunday newspaper advertisements of “Up in Mabel’s Room” were made to display a girl lying on a bed, with the suggestive catch-lines, “10,000 Visitors Weekly” and “Such a Funny Feeling.” Thus, the advertisements of another exhibit presented a rear view of a nude female with the title of the show, “Oh, Mommer,” printed across the ample buttocks. Thus, the advertisements of a Winter Garden music show, alluding to the runway used in these exhibitions, christened it “The Bridge of Thighs.”) No play presented in Philadelphia since “The Girl with the Whooping Cough” (subsequently suppressed by the New York police authorities on the ground of indecency) has been patronized to the extent where it has been found necessary to call out the police reserves to maintain order, as was the case when the play in point was produced. Washington is a cultural wilderness; I have personally attended the premières of ten highly meritorious dramas in the national capital in the last six years and can report accurately on the quality of the receptions accorded to them. Washington would seem still to be what it was some fifteen years or so ago when, upon the initial revelation of Barrie’s “Peter Pan,” it essayed to boo it into permanent discard. Baltimore, Detroit (save during the height of the war prosperity when the poor bohicks, wops, and Greeks in the automobile works found themselves suddenly able to buy theatre seats regularly), Cleveland, St. Louis, San Francisco--the story is the same. Honourable drama spells ruin; legs, lewdness and sentimentality spell riches.