New York Times

The New York Times was a newspaper in New York City. On 20 August 1916, they reported on the Battle of the Somme. (COMIC: The Weeping Angels of Mons) The paper also reviewed a show at the Laurenzi Theatre under the headline "PIG SLAVES IN MANHATTAN". (PROSE: "Pig Slaves in Manhattan")

PIG SLAVES IN MANHATTAN
On 10 January 1931, the paper reviewed a show at the Laurenzi Theater on Broadway. (PROSE: "Pig Slaves in Manhattan")


 * WHAT A SHOW! This is a three-hour extravaganza with 20 actors, countless extras and dancers, and a full complement of marvelously catchy show tunes. If you can imagine a fantasy of H.G. Wells with the hero rewritten as half-man, half-pig, or Mr. Eugene O'Neill's work and social concerns transplanted into a heady mix of theater and Hooverville, you will gain some idea.


 * As we know too well, it is a matter of weeks since a genuine series of unexplained disappearances among Central Park's dispossessed made headlines in our daily press. The writers have taken this sordid material and woven an intricately metaphorical tale, centered on the newly completed Empire State. In the ground beneath that true-life testament to American innovation, mutants in metal travel machines are conducting experiments on abducted homeless people, cross-breeding them with pigs to produce a new super-race. Our narrator-hostess is Tallulah, a showgirl whose fortunes are linked inextricably with those of Laszlo, a stagehand, and the destitute boy Frank, a young man with an instinct for charity who hungers for freedom. A run of boisterous dance numbers culminates in the arrival of a magician-doctor in a blue suit, a 'lover of showtunes', who exterminates the metal mutants, though not in time to save the Pig Slaves - except for one who happily lives happily ever after with the heroine. The magician doctor and his assistant then vanish in a blue box...


 * It makes its economic, as well as historic, point with some power, but that does no justice to a richly satirical musical, not least in a...


 * The article was continued elsewhere.