Variety. (The London Palladium.) The principal attraction at the Palladium
this week is Miss Dinah Shore ("Hollywood's Captivating Songstress "), who sings a number of American songs. While she does this she looks slightly appre- hensive, as though she momentarily expected some hitch to occur, and this injects a small but welcome element of suspense into a performance which might otherwise become almost too soothing. Last night her necklace came off and, not liking to throw it into the orchestra pit where she had already jettisoned her gloves, she moved up-stage to put it on one of the two pianos. This meant taking her mouth several feet away from the microphone, so that when she spoke we heard her voice as it sounds in (so to speak) real life. It was a very nice voice, but it seemed so extraordinary to hear some- one on the Palladium stage addressing us without the help of a microphone—the quality and volume of the sound were so totally different from what we had been hearing all the evening—that for a moment one felt a sense almost of dislocation.
Miss Shore's microphone was a special one, a sort of king cobra with a head the size of a Mills grenade. A large lady in pink, on the otherhand, who appeared briefly to describe the feat (" he has had no successful imitators") about to be performed by Con Colleano, the Toreador of the Wire, carried a sort of walkie-talkie shaped like an ear-trumpet, with the aid of which she succeeded in making her two lines perfectly audible. Mr. Jackie Hunter (the One-Man B.B.C.), forced by the exigencies of his act to abandon the down- stage microphone, had the ingenious idea of pretending to use a podable one on a long stand as a mine-detector while withdrawing to a previously prepared position up-stage. But most of the per- formers (except Max and his Gang, four of whom were dogs and who don't really count in this context, although they were very good) automatically put themselves in Coventry the moment their faces were more than a foot from the microphone. The effect of this is rather silly. I do not think that, as a nation, we are deafer than we were in the days of Marie Lloyd, and I can see no necessity for a convention which means, among other things, that no artiste can sing or crack a joke unless he or she is standing still in front of a mechanical appliance. To judge from the bill at the Palladium, what the English music-hall needs is more local talent, fewer imports and
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