DANCING PARTNER
1930
Dancing Partner is a play in five scenes by Alexander Engel and Alfred Grunwald, adapted by Frederic and Fanny Hatton. It was originally produced and directed by David Belasco.
The play is set at the Hotel Claridge in Paris, the Hotel Splendide-Royale in Biarritz, and on an airplane.
A young British aristocrat is offered an alternative by his guardian uncle: Debt, or marriage with a young girl of his own class, whom he has never seen. He does not want to marry, but he wants his debts paid and his income continued. So he counters his uncle's offer. Incognito he will attempt the seduction of the girl offered him as a wife. If the attempt is successful, the idea of marriage will be abandoned. The uncle accepts and the nephew hires himself to the girl as a gigolo. The unexpected happens and they fall in love. At the end of a month, the nephew takes the girl in a plane from Biarritz to San Sebastien, still for the purpose of seduction. But above the Basque coast she talks of heaven and tells him that he has taken her first kiss, and the strength of his intentions deserts him. She returns to her mother. The girl learns that her gigolo is also her proposed fiancé, turns the tables on him. She proposes that she appear with him in public disguised in a cloak. He refuses and the play ends.
The mechanics of bringing an airplane in flight to the stage was profiled (with photographs) in an article titled “The Stage Goes Air-minded” in the November 1930 issue of The Scientific American.
The illusion of flight was created by a crew member who physically moved the set to imitate the bumpiness of air travel. There were also projectors and loudspeakers, hidden from the audience by the aircraft’s wing, projected images of clouds, terra firma and starry skies directly on the backdrop.
“Belasco has delighted himself with the construction of a plane that roars, takes off, and jiggles gently in the air. It is, however, the only plane flying that makes a safe landing with its motors full on.” ~ JOHN CHAPMAN, THE DAILY NEWS
The play opened in Atlantic City at Nixon’s Apollo Theatre on the Boardwalk on July 24, 1930. The next day, Belasco celebrated his 76th birthday in Atlantic City, basking in the positive reviews by the local press. Dancing Partner would be his much-anticipated opening of the 1930 theatre season. It would be his last. Belasco died in May 1931.
After Atlantic City, the play opened in Brooklyn at the Brighton Theatre on July 28th.
The play 'landed’ on Broadway at the Belasco Theatre (previously the Stuyvesant), on August 5, 1930. It closed on November 15, 1930, running for 119 performances. Belasco announced that the play would not tour.
A movie version premiered in June 1931. It was first titled Dancing Partner, then The Princess and the Aviator, but eventually opened under the title Just a Gigolo. Irene Purcell reprised her stage role in the movie. Two weeks prior to the release of the film, Jason Joy of the Hays Office wrote:
"I have seen ‘Dancing Partner’ and am not able to determine whether it is good or bad. If it is thought of as light frothy fun, it is all right, but if it is thought of as a serious problem, it is bad."
The film was rejected by censor boards in Ireland, Nova Scotia and British Columbia, which rejected the film because of the "light treatment of immoral sex subjects."
The film opened in Atlantic City on July 26, 1931 at the Strand Theatre, on the Boardwalk opposite Steel Pier.






