"I love the girl, and the girl loves me, and yet I can't marry her because her parents want me to," cries Tommy. For three acts the authors of "Tommy" ring the changes on this theme, in a new home comedy at the Park, and but for the acting of Peg Entwistle, erstwhile Repertory prodigy, and Sidney Toler as her Uncle Dave, and perhaps Tommy-When-Drunk, as played by William Janney, the play would be as ineffectual as it sounds, and as popular.

It has all the elements of popularity; without a decent actor in the cast it would go big in Skowhegan, Maine. Indeed, its first performance on any stage was Down East somewhere under the title of Tommy Helps Himself. And they say it was a wow.

But it has taken quite a brace since then. It's a big boy now, and on its way to New York for a good time. Its parents took it to Atlantic City, and all the people on the boardwalk crowded around to pat it on the head. Its reception was only exceeded by that accorded George White's Scandals, which seems to prove that next to legs the American public likes lumps in its throat.

For three acts the audience and the authors worry themselves with the question, "Will Tommy get her?", and it takes the combined efforts of his rival Bernard, politican Uncle Dave, and a quart of something-or-other to put Tommy over for the winning score. The plot is as old as the theatre. There's a little French play of one act in which two old fathers conspire to marry the daughter of one to the son of the other. The key line is classic, "Marriage without obstacles isn't tempting to two such young simpletons." So the fathers fight, the children refuse to accept the feud as final separation, and Romeo-and-Juliet-like they defy the quarrel. The young lady is being abducted, her lover saves her. The fathers relent. All is forgiven. Curtain.

Here a minor variation makes another play. The parents are an obstacle, for they make matters too easy. They fairly dote on the young man. One would think it was they who were marrying Tommy, and before they are through they are almost left to do it. Marie, or Peg Entwistle, is the harrassed young lady, who almost tosses over her true love, who will some day inherit the town bank, for an automobile salesman, and a roadster existence.

The audience at the Park, most of whom never saw the inside of the Repertory, loved Peg almost as much as her nursery mates at the Repertory used to, which would seem to assure Miss Entwistle of a long career and a merry one, with IT safely in her possession. That she has sex appeal, which cries out even above the saccharine mouthings of Tommy, is evident. It is only to be prayed that her advent to Broadway in a nice sweet, sticky little homey comedy won't sentence her to the sugar bowl for life.

Until the last act it scarcely seems possible that that other promising juvenile." William Janney, who takes the hurdles as Tommy, can be compared to his teammate, Peg. But in the last act he stages a Jack Dalton, and saves the cLeeild, with an excellent performance as Tommy-When-Drunk, and that though he is sober as Andrew Volstead.

Father and mother are about as bad as any vaudeville team you ever saw, and but for the simple homeliness of their lines, which convulse the crowd, they could be dispensed with entirely. Mother has a cross between a Southern drawl and a nasal twang which defles geographical location. Father is as fidgety as your Aunt Emma, and twice as much of an old woman.

"Tommy" is about as sweet, simple and girlish as a graduate of the Skowhegan Female Seminary, and its success in New York seems assured. Before it changes its name again for Broadway consumption, and you lose sight of Peg go and see the reason for the Harvard attendance at the Repertory last year.