ike a good folk-opera for wholesome fun,
and the boy who can turn out a rollicking folk-opera for old and young
is Percy MacKaye. His latest is a riot from start to finish. You can buy
it in book form, published by Knopf. Just ask for "Rip Van Winkle" and
spend the evening falling out of your chair. (You wake up just as soon
as you fall and are all ready again for a fresh start.)

Of course it is a little rough in spots, but you know what Percy MacKaye
is when he gets loose on a folk-opera. It is good, clean Rabelaisian
fun, such as was in "Washington, the Man Who Made Us." I always felt
that it was very prudish of the police to stop that play just as it was
commencing its run. Or maybe it wasn't the police that stopped it.
Something did, I remember.

But "Rip Van Winkle" has much more zip to it than "Washington" had. In
the first place, the lyrics are better. They have more of a lilt to them
than the lines of the earlier work had. Here is the song hit of the
first act, sung by the Goose Girl. Try this over on your piano:

_Kaaterskill, Kaaterskill,
Cloud on the Kaaterskill!
Will it be fair, or lower?
Silver rings
On my pond I see;
And my gander he
Shook both his white wings
Like a sunshine shower_.

I venture to say that Irving Berlin himself couldn't have done anything
catchier than that by way of a lyric. Or this little snatch of a refrain
sung by the old women of the town:

_Nay, nay, nay!
A sunshine shower
Won't last a half an hour_.

The trouble with most lyrics is that they are written by song-writers
who have had no education. Mr. MacKaye's college training shows itself
in every line of the opera. There is a subtlety of rhyme-scheme, a
delicacy of meter, and, above all, an originality of thought and
expression which promises much for the school of university-bred
lyricists. Here, for instance, is a lyric which Joe McCarthy could
never have written:

_Up spoke Nancy, spanking Nancy,
Says, "My feet are far too dancy, Dancy O!
So foot-on-the-grass,
Foot-on-the-grass,
Foot-on-the-grass is my fancy, O!_"

Of course this is a folk-opera. And you can get away with a great deal
of that "dancy-o" stuff when you call it a folk-opera. You can throw it
all back on the old folk at home and they can't say a word.

But even the local wits of Rip Van Winkle's time would have repudiated
the comedy lines which Mr. MacKaye gives Rip to say in which "Katy-did"
and "Katy-didn't" fig