Sidelights from Stageland.[6]

Sidelights from Stageland.^[6]

By SECOND NIGHTER.

Little Tales of Idiosyncrasies, Adventures, and Misadventures That Playgoers Are Not Supposed to See or Hear.

Collected and written for The Scrap Book.

LASSOOED THE COMPLIMENT.

Slow Speech of a Stranger Caused Miss Morewin to Sacrifice Conventionality on the Altar of Curiosity.

There must be times when actors are put in the embarrassing position of hearing their work discussed in public places by people who have seen the performance and are not aware that any of those who have taken part in it are within ear-shot. And sometimes, when there is a wag in the party, there are real dramatic moments in such episodes. Here is a case in point that happened in New York not so very long ago.

A party of men were descending in the elevator on their way to lunch in one of New York’s tallest skyscrapers. The car stopped at a floor and a lady got on. The wag in the group of men instantly recognized her as Louise Morewin, who plays the mother-in-law in “The Heir to the Hoorah,” which he had seen a few nights before.

The car was pretty well crowded and the wag was so placed that in the mirror he could see Miss Morewin’s face without being seen himself. And the spirit of mischief entered his soul.

“Say, fellows,” he began, “you have all seen ‘The Heir to the Hoorah.’ What do you think of the mother-in-law?”

One and another expressed an opinion, more or less non-committal so far as the playing of the part was concerned. But this did not satisfy the wag. It must be remembered that the building is very tall and that it requires some minutes for the elevator to reach the ground floor, so after the other comments had been gathered in, there was still time for a snapper.

“Well,” he remarked, “I saw the play the other night, and I think the actress who plays that mother-in-law is——”

He inserted a pause for impressiveness, and Miss Morewin could stand no more. Stepping around so that she faced him she broke out with:

“Well, what do you think of her?”

“I think she is immense,” finished the wag, utterly unruffled, while his friends, who had failed to recognize their fellow passenger, stood with jaws dropped at the spectacle of the strange woman butting into their conversation.

As for Miss Morewin, she smiled, flushed a little, and when the car reached the street level, she hastily mingled with the throng and was lost to sight.

THE MODEST CHORUS MAN.

Owners of Bass and Tenor Voices are Regarded As Necessary Evils by the Producers of Musical Comedies.

We hear much of the chorus girl, but very little of the chorus man, who is no doubt considered by the manager a necessary evil, inasmuch as girls are not endowed, outside of dime museums at least, with bass and tenor voices. I know one of the four chorus men who made an oasis of deep tones in the blossoming garden of Weber & Fields’s girls, but he soon was promoted from the ranks to a principal part and is now reaping profits as a writer of comic songs.

He went into the business because he wanted to go on the stage, and found this the easiest door to it. Why do other chorus men take up the thing, I asked myself, and to find out, I proceeded to get acquainted with two young fellows in the George M. Cohan company, where chorus work is a very important feature of the proceedings.

“Why did you take up this line?” I asked outright of one fellow, a big-boned chap who was formerly a cigarmaker in Chicago.

“Because I wanted to see the world,” he replied. “That’s the reason I prefer one-night stands to long runs.”

“But you must run up against some hard ones in the way of dressing-rooms among the small towns of the country,” I reminded him. And then I told of some “Florodora” girls I had heard about who were each assigned a chair on which to make their half-dozen or more changes of costume.

“Oh, exclaimed the former cigar-man, that’s nothing. I’ve had to dress on the turn of a stairs, where the bend made an extra wide step.”

“How easy is it for a man to get into the chorus?” was my next query.

“If he has a good second bass or high tenor voice, it’s a cinch.”

I then discovered that physique counts more than it used to, not good looks, for make-up will cover freckles or sallow skin, but a fellow must be well-built, and know how to hold himself.

The other chap, also from Chicago, used to be in the electric business, but with his brother he happened to belong to a lodge of the Order of the Maccabees. They could both sing and dance, and at an entertainment of the lodge did so in public. This put the stage bee in the head of the younger, and through cheek and shameless recitations of utterly fictitious engagements he had already filled, he procured a chance to do Pish-Tush in a “Mikado” company that stranded after two performances.

Prevarication, in fact, seems to be the order of the day in the theatrical business, so that I cannot for the life of me make out why one member of the profession should ever believe what the other says, knowing the rule of the road, as it were, and what he would say himself under similar circumstances.

This Earl Stanley (the grandiloquent stage name my second chorus friend chose for himself) knew nothing about making-up and learned it by deftly following the motions of the man he was assigned to dress with, who actually remarked on the newcomer’s aptness in the art.

“You two fellows,” I observed, “were lucky to get an all-summer engagement with ‘The Governor’s Son’ on the roof, after ‘George Washington, Jr.,’ closed. All the chorus men were not held over, by a long shot.”

“All the good ball players were,” replied Lisle, and then it came out that Cohan is a baseball fiend, and to play good ball, all other things being equal, assists a man in getting a job in his companies, each of which sports its nine.

Oh, as to a chorus man’s pay, it ranges from eighteen to thirty dollars a week, all costumes being furnished by the management.

RECALCITRANT BENEFACTOR.

Sarah Bernhardt Encountered Series of Failures While Trying to Reward Man Who Befriended Her Family.

Last June Sarah Bernhardt sailed back to Paris after the most successful season she ever had in America. She took her profits with her in gold, too, and nobody should begrudge her the money, for, besides being a great artist, she is a generous soul, and is not chary of passing her good fortune on to others.

The following instance of this spirit of generosity is recorded by the San Francisco Call, and vouched for as authentic by one of The Scrap Book staff who has personal knowledge of the affair:

When Sarah Bernhardt was in the city some years ago she gave a breakfast to some of her friends at the California Hotel. It was served about noon, and there were but three persons present besides herself.

In the midst of the repast a bell-boy knocked at the door and said that there was a man down-stairs who refused to give his card and insisted on coming up to see her.

“Let him come, then,” was her reply.

The bell-boy explained that he had the appearance of a tough-looking tramp and might be crazy.

“Never mind his looks or his clothes, he may be a friend of mine,” was the reply.

In a few minutes a man of about sixty or more entered the room. He was very shabbily dressed, had not shaved for a week, and his shirt-front was well garnished with tobacco-juice.

The instant Bernhardt saw him she gave an exclamation and bounded forward. She threw herself upon his neck and covered his rough face with kisses.

The man was Mr. Levi, a furrier, who died recently in this city. Many of the Call readers will remember his short, heavy figure as he used to walk the streets with furs thrown over his shoulder, looking for customers.

Bernhardt at once made a place at the table and began opening champagne for her guest. She introduced him as an old friend from Paris and explained that when she was a child and her family was in straits Mr. Levi had cared for them all one winter and kept them from absolute want.

Every few moments she would jump up, clasp him about the neck and kiss him again and again. There was no acting about these embraces, she was glad to see him, and she wanted no misunderstanding on that score.

Presently she asked him why he did not go back to Paris and see his relatives. He answered, sadly, that he was not able.

“Oh, that is easily remedied,” she said, and a moment later she had written out a check for fifteen hundred dollars and thrown it across the table to him.

He picked it up, and when he saw the amount he broke down completely. With the tears streaming down his cheeks he said:

“Sarah, I didn’t come here for charity, but just to see you a few moments.”

He handed the check back across the table.

“Oh, not enough? I make it bigger.”

She wrote another check for two thousand dollars and threw it over to him. He looked at the second check and merely said:

“Give me the other, Sarah.”

She smiled as she handed it to him, and then the old man did a magnificently independent thing. He slowly placed the two checks together, tore them into bits and handed the fragments back to the madame.

“No, no, Sarah; no money. Just your gratitude; that is all I ever wanted.”

Then she was at his side again, kissing his tears away and sobbing herself. It was a very pathetic scene and one not easily forgotten by those who witnessed it.

She said that she would “fix him yet” in that peculiar way of hers, which always means that she intends to have her own will.

Some months later I was in San Francisco and met old Levi waddling along the streets with his furs. He stopped me and said he wanted my advice.

“I have just got a letter from Sarah,” he said, “and I don’t know what the devil to do about it.”

He translated the letter as he read it, and it went something like this, as near as I can recall it:

“You tore up the last check I gave you, which was very mean of you. I was very angry at the way you treated my checks. No one else ever did such a thing to me but you, and you make me angry every time I think of you and your treatment of me. You humiliate me before strangers. They must have thought that my checks were worthless, or you must have thought so.

“I now enclose another and larger one. It is for twenty-five hundred dollars of your American money and if that is not big enough send it back and I will make it larger, but some check of some denomination you must accept, and if I gave you all the money I ever earned it would not repay you for the time years ago in Paris you saved me from want. I shall expect you to come to Paris at once and be my guest. Answer yes by cable and make us all happy. If you do not do this you must never call on me again, as I shall refuse to receive you. Affectionately,

“Sarah.”

“What shall I do?” asked the old man with tears in his eyes. “She is bound to have her way. She always was that way as a child.”

“Better send the despatch and then cash the check and go to Paris.”

“I guess I’ll have to,” said the old man, and he started for the telegraph office.

BETTER THEATER PROGRAMS

Innovation at Weber’s May Result in the Disappearance of Smudgy Blanket Sheets in Other Playhouses.

When the late Clement Scott, the well-known English dramatic critic, visited this country in 1900, he wrote his impressions of American theaters for the London Sketch and devoted his second paragraph to the bill of the play. His comment ran as follows:

No fees for programs? I should think not, indeed! You find a huge stack of them under your very nose, and you can take any number you like, from one to one hundred. The difficulty Is to find the actual program when you have possessed yourself of one of these bulky pamphlets, for there is only a “halfpennyworth of program” amid “an intolerable deal of sack” in the way of advertisements and facetiæ.

But Mr. Scott failed to mention the worst feature of the American programs—the black smut left on the ladies’ gloves and the men’s knuckles from the smudgy type with which they are printed. The sixpence one must part with in order to become possessed of a London house-bill is really not begrudged in exchange for the neat card, folded at the two sides to make it convenient for the pocket and on which the most prominent features are the details respecting the play you have come to see.

In New York the program concession has been for years in the hands of a big firm which has paid the theaters large sums for the privilege of distributing bills of the play, and audiences have had to submit in patience to what this monopoly was pleased to give them. But there is hope ahead and Joe Weber deserves the credit for being the pioneer in a worthy innovation to make theatergoing the all round pleasure it ought to be.

Just before he closed the doors of his music hall for the summer, Mr. Weber amazed his patrons by providing them with a program de luxe, each enclosed in an oiled paper envelope, and printed in four colors on heavy coated paper. To be sure, it consists of forty-two pages, including the cover, but the bill of the play is in the exact center, making it easy to find, and the advertisements are most attractively displayed and illustrated.

The thing was got up by a firm of four hustling young men, who have already thrown into a panic the older firm, causing them to announce for this new season lithographed covers done in six colors. Whether as a whole the thing will be as attractive as the Weber program remains to be seen, but, in any case, the public are to be congratulated, for as the spirit of competition has entered the field, audiences will reap the benefit.

In London you buy your program from the young woman who shows you to your seat, for whom this practical Clement Scott had no great liking. Of this young woman Mr. Scott said:

I prefer the American “usher,” with the suave but determined manner, to our haughty and flighty girls at home, who think it a condescension to show you to your seat, the whereabouts of which they are usually as ignorant of as you are yourself. In an American theater you are marshaled to your seat with military regularity. In England you are at the mercy of some Miss Tousle Head who, so far as her business is concerned, is either insolently independent or sublimely ignorant.

CRITICS BAD WEATHERCOCKS.

Last Season’s Records Proved Inability of Newspaper Writers to Show How Dramatic Winds Were Blowing.

Of what use are dramatic critics anyway? Brady’s attack on them from the stage last winter was a mere pin-prick to the humiliation they must feel as makers of public opinion in connection with “The Lion and the Mouse.” When the play was brought out in New York last fall the comments were almost universally adverse, yet the people took to the piece like ducks to water, and it looks now as if it would run the year round at the Lyceum. When it was tried in London, on the other hand, the reviews were exceedingly favorable, and yet the thing lasted barely two weeks.

Take, for example, the London Daily Telegraph, which summed up its report in these words: “To last night’s audience, let it be added, the piece made evidently a very direct and forcible appeal, the applause at the end of the third act, as on the final fall of the curtain, being of the most tumultuous and enthusiastic description.”

The Standard declared: “‘The Lion and the Mouse’ is a play to be seen—it is imperfect and crude, but it is drama, strong, intense, undeniable.”

The Tribune even went so far in its praise that it felt constrained to add: “As a sop to our national self-respect, however, we may remember that the author, Charles Klein, hails originally from this side of the Atlantic.”

PLAYHOUSE NOMENCLATURE.

The Names of Some Recently Christened Theaters Indicate a Painful Lack of Propriety and Variety.

The announcement that David Belasco will manage the new theater to be built in Forty-Fourth Street, and will call it the Stuyvesant, adds another appropriately named house to the group that has been growing up in New York of late years. The Hudson, the New Amsterdam, the Knickerbocker, the Manhattan and the Astor are all indigenous of the soil and are to be commended.

Liberty is not bad, although, to be sure, it would be more happily situated in Philadelphia than in Gotham. The Quaker City is now to make a needed departure from its run on street nomenclature by calling the house now building the William Penn Theater.

Speaking of Pennsylvania, it was too bad Pittsburgh sank the historic Duquesne in “Belasco”—all right in itself, but the name Belasco loses its force as a distinctive title when duplicated too many times. Three cities now have theaters of this title—New York, Washington, and Pittsburgh.

And Shuberts, more’s the pity, will soon be as thick as huckleberries in August. The house that should be known by this name is the Princess in New York, which would thereby be exchanging a cognomen perfectly inappropriate in America, for one that would much better stand over one house in New York than over twenty elsewhere.

It is a thousand pities that the name Booth was suffered to vanish from over a theater’s doors when Booth’s, at the corner of Sixth Avenue and Twenty-Third Street, was pulled down. All that remains of it is a bust of Shakespeare in the side wall of McCreery’s, on the latter thoroughfare.

It is odd, too, when you come to think of it, that we have no Shakespeare Theater. It is a pity Charles Frohman did not use this—or at any rate Globe (the name of the house Shakespeare managed) rather than Empire. This might better have been Republic, which, when the Empire was opened in 1893, was still in the market, not having been affixed to the theater which Hammerstein built later and very soon passed over to Belasco. Another absolutely footless theater name in the United States is Savoy. Garrick is good, and Criterion not bad.

WHAT MAKES A PLAY?

English Managers Tell of the Methods They Employ In Estimating Value of Manuscripts.

Not long since the Grand Magazine, of London, held a symposium of opinions from the leading English managers on the elements in a play which determined their acceptance or rejection of it. It cannot be said that the result may be read with much profit by the aspiring playwright. Doubtless those managers who, according to a footnote, declined “for one reason or another” to discuss the methods which governed their choice, were wiser in their day and generation than those who did. For, after all, it is a gamble. And what’s one man’s meat may be another’s poison.

Take, for example, the assertion of Frederick Harrison, of the London Haymarket. He declares:

“I must be quite alone when I read a play, secure from interruption, and read it through at a sitting, and rapidly. If it will not bear rapid reading there is generally something wrong—incoherence of story, clumsiness of dialogue, or something that detracts from the probability of success for the play.”

Contrast this method with an incident vouched for in the Dramatic Mirror by the popular playwright Haddon Chambers, on his recent visit to this country. Speaking of one of his most successful plays, he said:

“Mr. Beerbohm Tree had the piece three months before he ever looked at it. Then, one day, I managed to read him the first two acts. The following day he was slightly indisposed and very courteously put me off. I saw him go into the Turkish bath, followed him, finished the reading then and there, and had the work accepted.”

Lewis Waller, the actor-manager, practically gets no further in the course of half a page report than telling the kind of play he does not want—ordinary melodrama or a farcical comedy.

Frank Curzon, who rivals Charles Frohman in the number of theaters he manages, and who is now a partner with James K. Hackett in “Mr. Hopkinson” and other ventures in America, says, on the other hand:

“When I read a play, I do not care to which class it belongs. If it hits me hard enough I produce it.”

The recipe for George Edwardes, the great musical comedy producer, is first an idea that shall be simple in character but capable of elaboration in a way that shall give striking opportunities to the members of his company. Often the locale or the background for the piece is selected long before the plot is attached to it.

W. H. Kendal, who frequently used to visit us with his wife—a sister of the late Tom Robertson, the teacup and saucer playwright—insists rather indefinitely that the characters shall live before him and that their story shall interest him.

Tom B. Davis, another musical comedy expert, in whose theater “Florodora” was brought out, thinks that the plot is not of supreme importance, but he wants the low comedian woven into the story in such a way that when the lovers find themselves in a predicament the audience shall know that it is he who will help them out. He also deems it advisable that “a dramatic situation shall be led up to in the finale of the first act, in which the baritone and the prima donna shall be the central figures.”

Altogether, Mr. Davis is the most explicit in his rules of any of the bunch, for of the two remaining entries for the Grand’s symposium, Fred Terry—who originally produced “Sunday”—sums up the order in which the interesting factors in a play should be put as, first, Heart; second, Heart; third, Heart, and Cyril Maude, the English Little Minister, confines himself to the statement that he would not choose a gloomy play.