The Salt Lake herald. [volume] (Salt Lake City [Utah]) 1870-1909, 1907-08-25


and study the action underneath.
The title of THE Lady From Lanes"
is founded on the farce of 1.-The Wrong
Mr.. Wright THE GAY Tcreadors'
fooled me. Desiring to give an account
of the first new seasons extravaganza
down on the level of the touring bur-
lesque, and with a vague hope that 1t
would show a rise from crude vulgari-
ty, went to see this play with a name
promising Spanish beauty The line
up of the ballet-chorus indicated that
the promise would be kept Six girls
sauntered forth in the trailing gowns
of Madrid royal court ladies': then six
in the short skirts of Carmencitas; and
finally six in the brief trouserettes of
feminized bull fighters. All this was
sufficiently Espanola to allay my latent
apprehension that the show might be
domestic and familiar, instead of for
eign and novel.
Have you observed that the initial
stageful in a play of girls strikes you
as an aggregation of loveiiness? But
as the evening wears on and you pass
from collective TO individual scrutiny,
you see that your eyes were glamored
at the first sight, and that the rows of
fairies of perfection become quite NOR
tai, with obvious blemishes, upon an
hours acquaintance. The one at the
near corner, with the most amiable
grin in the row, has teeth that CLEAN
gold with their pearls. The one at the
further corner, whose capers are the
most gracefully agile. is knock-kneed
and splay-fOOted. Some that charmed
you full-faced at the first view olsen
chant you with their profiles. A slen-
der seraph develops the joints of her
skeleton, and plump cherub exposes
lumpiness of fat. A month of honey
Of hrfH To-
physical faults to her husband than the
usual, ordinary, $1S-per-week stage
siren does in one evenings performance
TO any man who isn't foolish. Which is
to say that the showgirls in THE Gay
ToreadOrs' who look like Broadway at
BIS O'Clock are manifestly Bowery by
10:45.
But that isn't what fooled me. No
one should expect two-dollar quality in
a half-dOllar purchase of extravagan-
"a. 1t was the play itself that makes
me wait to describe the earliest original
female minstrelsy of the season in New
York until next week. Instead of THE
Gay TOreadOr" being new, it was an old
Weber-Fields piece cheapened woeful-
ly. 1 know for sure that Lillian Rus
sell got thousand week in the orig
inal production, and De Wolf Hopper
was said to get as much, while in THE
more than fifty apiece in the payroll.
Weber and Fields, who made fortunes
with German-American dialectic hu-
NOR, are initiated here remarkably by a
team from vaudeville. And the sue
cessOr to John Kelly, whose tale of
trained trout was listened. to at two
hundred a week by Charles Bigelow,
tells it now to a ten-to-twenty dollar
hearer.
ssrrI,o+ tro,,+ Fo1Ior-o5 ~ o,,o-,,
where" says the liar, land one day, in
crossing a bridge. the fish missed its
footing, fell into the water and was
drowned"
At that point the audience used to
laugh. Now there is utter silence,
take that to prove a wide difference be-
tween extravaganza that amuses full
price and half-price audiences. Royal
ty is paid for the Weber Fields mate
rial, no doubt, and it is used with CON
siderable facility; but 1t doesn't please
a smoking and drinking crowd as well
as the inferior usual stuff roughly de-
iivered. 1 shall try to describe a new
show in female minstrelSy" of the pre-
vailing sort next Sunday.
The stage sight of mulatto comedians
colOred to look like negroes is given
this week in Captain Rufus" and THE
Shoo-f1y Regiment" These companies
breeds in a ratio of Caucasian blood to
African at about four to one. But the
blackening is confined to several men.
The women are given to whitening
They don't include one characteristic
wench in either play. They powder
and rouge away their yellow and
brown, smoothe the last hint of a kink
out of their hair, and contrive to elm
mate nearly all traces of racial amaIga-
nation. Not much fiattening of noses
or thickening of lips is left to mark
and African ancestry. None of them is
a blonde, of course, but neither is one
any more brunette than a Spanish Sc
norita might be. They have no tones
or old plantation melody in their voices
none Of the cake-wallxing gait, nor
any of the darkey quaintness
Are there Johnnies in the front seats
to admire these saffron and chocolate
show girls? And Willies to wait for
them at the back door? Yes, indeed. But
they are of a complexion shading dark
er than the objects of their attention
The rule of the two theatres-that
white folks may sit in the parquet is
suspended during these ENGAGEMENTS.
and so New York chappies with sporty
negro blood in their veins are taking
their turn at actress chasing They
lounge in the main Hobbies between
acts, smoking and chatting, instead of
keeping to the gallery as usual; they
have bouquets, presumably with notes
inside, thrown over the footlights bv
the ushers, and they are close imita-
tons altogether of the white Washers;
but the doors of the midnight restau-
rants are not open to them, and 1 won
der where they take their dusky sweet
hearts for after-the-shew suppers.
Whichever of Williams and Walker
that is the droll comedian, who black
ems his face. shuffles his feet. and
makes himself exhibit A in the evil
dence that man did descend from the
ape, is numerously initiated from Dock
stader's Neil O'Brien in minstrelsy to
a dozen in vaudeville; but of that type
of funney black man there is none in
Captain Rufus" or 1.-THE Shortly Re
giment." However, two effectually gro
tesque comedians are in Uncle Ru-
fus." while THE Shortly Regiment"
has an equally ludierous chap in the
petticoats of a Topsy. AS one play is
year old in Chieago's negro theatre,
and the other has made long tour, TO
describe them wouldn't be newsy. The
only point l would dwell on is that they
contain small proportions of negroism
to much that might as we'll be pure