The San Francisco call., 1896-05-10

comedy that scintillates with
N genius, but it is bright and enter
tanning. More than that, it tells a
tangible tale in dialogue, and is not m ereIy
string of clumsy pegs on which to hang
third and fourth rate vaudeville perform
ances. Strange to say, the public in this
City seems to prefer farce-comedies that
are mere excuses for vaudeville shows. 1t
is hard to say why this should be so, for
the Orpheum gives better variety show
than any farce comedy organization can
afford to offer. There are expenses of
scenery, stage management, ETC., con-
nected with theatrical company, even if
1t is theatrical company only in name,
which makes it improbable to engage as
good all-round vaudeville stars as a regu-
lar music-hall organization can present.
We have been so dosed with bad singing
and worse dancing, under the name OF
farce-comedy, that 'The Strange Advent
ures of Miss Brown" at the Baldwin comes
as refreshing relief.
The modern stage-manager gets in more
OF his deadly work every year. Plays are
constantly becoming more spectacular
and realistic, tanks are bigger, machinery
is more complicated and millinery and
smart frocks are rapidly becoming of more
Importance than good plays and clever
acting. But what a boon the stage
manager would confer upon dramatic art,
If he could be induced to restrict his efforts
TO new plays and TO melodramas! No one
would grudge him those, for generally
speaking they are not worth rescuing from
his clutches. But alas the stage. manager,
the milliner and the modiste are slowly
but insidiousIy encroaching on all that
is sacred in the drama, though of the
great plays Goethe's Faust has hitherto
suffered most at their hands.
There is scope in Faust" for spectacular
display, but the line should be drawn
somewhere, and that somewhere assuredly
is at Illuminating the flowers in Margue-
rites garden with incandescent lights
Could anything be mere banal and vulgar?
One thinks at once OF a superior sort OF
beer-garden, or at best expositlon-grounds,
with military band playing and electric
fountains somewhere IL the background
All the illusion of quaint medieval Nurem-
burg is shattered by this fin de steele inno-
walton, as completely as if Marguerite
chewed gum or Faust interrupted his love-
making to order cocktails for two.
It's Morrisons Faust that they are
playing at the Columbia; the name of
Goethe does not figure anywhere on the
programme. The public is informed who
supplied the electric light, who made the
costumes, who directs the destiny of the
calcium glow, but the man who wrote the
play is not worth mentioning. 1t is Just
as well, perhaps. In another and better
world Goethe might jangle his harp and
play harsh discords if this particular Nor
rison production of Faust were brought
prominently to his notice; but how indig-
nant We should be if foreigners ignored
our American geniuses in that way. Sup.
pose Berlin managers took it into their
heads to produce works written by men
on this side of the Atlantic and excluded
the names of the original writers to glorify
those OF their own countrymen. We should
feel out and injured if we saw that Herr
Won PiltZner's robin Hood" was quite the
rage in Berlin or that the Baron Won Pret-
zeps laughable comedy "a Trip to China
town" was the hit of the theatrical season
in the Fatherland, and there is no doubt
that we should question whether the
Herr's and the Baron's adaptations were
scintillating enough to blot ont the names
OF the original writer's 1t is the modern
tendency, however, both, in plays and
music. to give credit to the gentlemen who
make the adaptations or transcriptions
and give little or none to the original
writers, SO Morrison, who has three
Faust" companies on the road, is quite
abreast with the times.