It's a Boy

A pram rattles down a sun-bleached boardwalk, its occupant a solemn, wide-eyed infant whose mere presence uncorks a carnival of panic in a seaside resort: bathing belles shriek, temperance-league matrons faint, hotel clerks hyperventilate, and an entire constabulary force forgets which end of the truncheon is for swinging. The child—gender strategically undisclosed—belongs to none and therefore to everyone, a communal hot potato that ricochets from the manicured clutches of Louise Fazenda’s feather-hatted suffragette to the trembling gloves of Jane Allen’s pearl-strung socialite, through the slapstick gauntlet of Billy Armstrong’s inebriated bellhop, past the Keystone-cops chaos engineered by Patrick Kelly and Fanny Kelly’s married detectives, until it finally lands in the leash-bound custody of Teddy the Dog, whose stoic canine rectitude outclasses the entire human cast. The plot, a Rube Goldberg contraption of mistaken parentage, forged birth certificates, and pre-Prohibition champagne bottles, detonates a daisy-chain of collapsing chaise longues, runaway bath chairs, and a pier-end punch-up scored only by surf and kazoo. By the time the tyke’s true lineage is revealed—inside a candle-lit lighthouse during a thunderstorm that would make Victor Hugo blush—every corset has popped, every top-hat has been sat upon, and the audience has laughed itself hoarse at the spectacle of respectability stripped to its skivvies.