The Blue Ghost - Newspaper Ad

Oakland Tribune - April 26, 1930

Here is another ad that caught my eye while I was searching for other stuff. I felt it was worth clipping and sharing here based on the title alone. But what is it, exactly? Well, I did a little digging and this what little I learned...

The Blue Ghost, by Bernard McOwen and J.P. Riewerts, is an old dark house yarn wherein a group of people gather together at the gloomy home of one Dr. De Former. Their intention is to investigate the bizarre occurrences that are happening in the house and to solve the mystery of the blue ghost.

Although the Oakland Tribune did not have a critic review this production's brief run at the Dufwin Theater, they did quote a review from the Evening World that was for its concurrent Broadway performances. An unnamed critic is quoted raving at how, "Eerie, ghostly, uncanny things happened so fast and furiously that the weak gasped, the strong gulped, and the blasé blinked."

Uh, okay...

The Tribune article goes on to share how the production offered "sliding panels, clutching hands, ghostly apparitions, doors that open and shut without human touch, flying daggers, shots in the dark and cloaked figures." Wow. That sounds like a good time to me.

The article then closes with the observation that this new mystery play is "said to have more humor than a majority of its companions."

I also learned that co-writer Bernard J. McOwen played Dr. De Former on Broadway. That production opened on March 10, 1930 and closed in June of that year, after just 112 performances. About 14 weeks on the Great White Way, at what was once the Forrest Theater and is now the Eugene O'Neill Theatre.

Learning that factoid got me to do a little more digging, which uncovered a less than stellar review of The Blue Ghost that appeared in the March 11 edition of the Brooklyn Eagle. 

The unnamed critic for that paper derided the production as "one of those plays of creaking boards, flickering lights, windows that open and shut without rhyme or reason, and appearing and disappearing ghosts, gargoyles, clutching hands and arms - also without rhyme or reason." Ouch.

This critic notes that the cast "works hard with the material available," calls a character a racial slur, and closes with the opinion that The Blue Ghost "should have been billed a burlesque of a mystery play."

I feel compelled to add, although this is pretty much stating the obvious, the fact that racist language was used to describe a character, but not the performer, suggests that blackface was used in the production. It was 1930, after all...