The San Francisco call., 1898-04-03

;. If "The Cat and the Cherub" had not eone into the vaudeville bl mess and come to skim the milky way of Anna Held I suppose we never would have had the opportunity of finding out for ourselves just what is the relationship between the Chinatown melodrama of Chester Bailey Fernald and the China :. town melodrama of Francis Powers. For the Chinatown play has had its nine days wondership and is gone from the fads of men. In London, where time runs on easy tires and "Charley's Aunt" celebrating its fifteen hun dredth performance is reckoned in the very flower of its first run, "The Cat and the Cherub' may still be taken in by tourists and strangers. Over here Chinatown has been wined off the dra- matic map. The punk, the tomtom and the hatchet-man are among the dead among the lately dead, the deadest of all.
 But, while 1t may not be meet to ag- gravate the post-mortem with a com plete comparative study of the values, absurdities and plagiarisms of the two plays, I cannot, on the other hand, let pass the one serious dramatic present. ation we have had in months. Having read MT. Fernald's newspaper commun- ication, in which he pleads not guilty . of the Baldwin production of his play, and having witnessed the play a sec ond time and made every human al iowance for the impotency of its enact nient, I feel it in me to be marvelously
 
 gone to the labor of familiarizing my self with MT. Fernald's book of China town sketches, from the title of one or which he gets the title of his play-The Cat and the Cherub.' You may have noticed that this title has nothing to do with the play itself. It has as lit tie to do with this play as the play has to do with MT. Fernald's stories. Had MT. Fernald dramatiZed any or all of his own stories he could never haVe accused MT. Powers of plagiarizing him. In applying the title of one of them to this Chinatown play, MT. Fernald makes a delicate protest against MT Powers, offers him an ingenious re- hinder that he is not the only Colum- bus that Chinatown ever knew. And if you have the acquaintance of MT. Fernalds book you must admit that the verbal characteristics of MT. Pow CTS learned doctor are, to certain extent, inspired by those of a similar parsonage in the book. Several little touches-like, say, the doctors super stitious allusion to the spots on his fin ger nails and the appellation, Gnu chu monster" applied to a locomotive are notoriously in, and doubtless sug- gested to Powers by, the book. How ever, thev are hardly the exclusive in- Vention of MT. Fernald, the "Choo- choo" idea, for one, having been elab- orately presaged many years ago by the Chinese who saw his first cable car and exclaimed, No pushee. no pullee go like hellee all samee!' But the stage atmosphere of The Cat and the Che rub" Its instrumentation eff I may so phrase), divisions and developments are emphatically after Powers-and, for all of Fernald's happy metaphor and other literary accomplishment, a long, long way after in point of theatrical effec- tiveness.
 I grant you that Powers must have read the Fernald book before writing The First Born that it's sketches, most likely. sent him dreaming through the tunnels and alleys of Chinatown, so handy round the corner-neverthe- less. his play is more his own than Macbeth" is Shakespeare's. And it is this Powers play. not the Century sto- ries. which Mir Fernald has drama tized under title of "The Cat and the Cher ub," just as Richard Le Gallienne re- arranged Edward Fitzgerald, calling the job Le Gallienne's Omar Khay- yam"
 The ending of MT. Fernald's version is splendidly grim and fascinating, but kept from it's full strength by bad play wrighting, CT too many literary four ishes-it amounts to the same in this instance. The time has come when vengeance will claim its own-you feel 1t. The doctor and his sons murderer sit side by side on the bench-the same bench where they had sat in the open ing of the piece And because it Is the same bench and the same characters. MT. Fernald must need exploit the Ire current theme" repeat the opening re- marks about retribution, while his au- dience fidgets for the vengeance de- taired. The approach has made inev- itable the murderers doom; nothing re- mains but the deed, to be done in de- cent leisureliness, if you like, but with enough celerity not to lose you the spell and plague you with the horrible