Smouldering at the recurrent statements that he cannot play the harp at all, Harpo appears at least to have fixed his own so that no one else can play it.įortunately, there was at that time a striking resemblance between these two of the brothers, so striking, in fact, that the mild, innocent Harpo had his hair pulled on several occasions by enraged women who explained later that they had mistaken him for the devastating Chicco.
Why, say the professors, this zany even tunes his harp in a fashion so preposterous that if a really good harpist should try to pluck a melody from his strings, the result would not only be painful. Professors of the harp assure me with tears in their eyes that his heresies in fingering are so deplorable that it would be too late now even to begin teaching him a correct attack upon the inscrutable strings. Like Berlin, whose Remember he has been twanging sweetly every night, he is musically illiterate.
It is, indeed, one of the more annoying phenomena of the American theatre that a man should become known from coast to coast by the name of an instrument which, properly speaking, he cannot play at all. With the patiently educated musicians who shudder at his technique, I have the greatest sympathy. So now in the program of the Lyric, as well as in the croquet world (where he might be described as ambitious but no more than adequate) and also in the weekly shambles of the Thanatopsis Pleasure and Inside Straight Club, Arthur Marx is known only as Harpo. There he and his brothers were celebrated for many years before Broadway graciously discovered them, and, in its infuriatingly parochial way, proceeded to assume either that they had just gone on the stage or, more plausibly had been in confinement somewhere for a generation. For he lost both names somewhere in the shuffle of the two-a-day. But this fascinating question is of purely academic interest. His name is Marx-either Adolph or Arthur according to the date of the record you consult. Even the commuters forget all about that 11.25 for Mamaroneck and when his turn is done, the applause is an avalanche. Nightly the hilarious audience, of which you would have sworn that each member would rather die then and there than listen to anyone play anything pays him the tribute of an abrupt and breathless hush. Nightly now in the performance of The Cocoanuts at the Lyric Theatre-a Broadway playhouse built years ago by Reginald DeKoven but given over this season to the jauntier tunes of Irving Berlin-there comes a moment when a mute and ineffably comic clown stops his antics, cuddles up in a pool of light to a great, golden harp and plays it with a caressing stroke that is all his own.