The Salt Lake herald. [volume] (Salt Lake City [Utah]) 1870-1909, 1907-09-15
The Stage as a Pulpit
BY FRANKLIN FYLES.

the Mouse" or The Man of the Hour"
but the second half was a diminuendo.
The husband and father of an extrav-
agant family i'm THE Man on the
Case steals his wife's diamonds to
pawn, fixes up a fake burglary, calls
| in private detective. and thus tries
to hold off bankruptcy until his daugh-
ter can marry an heir to thirty mil
lions. This wealthy chap is a stranger,
and so is able to change guises with
the sleuth, thereby gaining an oppor-
tunity to win the girl on his merits.
Miss Furniss has taken a stale idea, as
you see, but she freshens it with orig
inaI fun, and the outcome is a merry
farce. with jameson Lee Finney COM
ing out strongly as an Ananias light
comedian. telling tales of his superior
| ity to Sherlock Holmes in exploits of
detection and at the same time finding
out about the bogus robbery. While he
wooes the girl as the detective, the real
detective displeases her with coarse
ness as the millionaire, and all comes
out right The girls getting of a thirty
times millionaire, while believing she
| is losing him, is made agreeable by
| Elsie Leslie Winter, who has for a year
or two been seen in the parquet OF New
/ York theatres, with her father-in-law,
the venerable yet still vigorous William
| Winter. but now reappears on the stage
/ to show that she is an adept comedf-
enne.
The detective figuring as the man of
money is a study in slang. How keen
/ Americans are TO that sort of wit. The
stealer of the diamonds. seeing that
| he is likely to be exposed, decides to
| take the man off the case.
You're goin' T. git the rubber ball, -
| says the detective.
The first audience laughed instantly,
and the millionaire had to wait to ex-
plain with; ''Oh, I see, I'm to get the
| bounce" OF course. the people wouldn' t
| laugh again, and even seemed a little
| miffed by the aspersion on its alertness.
/ Now, what was to be done. The eX-
/ PLANTATION had to be cut out. surely:
but that left the verbal bounce of the
rubber bali with Charles Lamb when
| il had been meant for the featured
/ Mr.. Finney. l don't know that F'inney
complained. yet Miss Furniss came to
] his help, and in the third performance
the ball rebounded to him, while Lamb
still kept little hit at it.
! You're goin' L be t'rOwn down,
Lamb now says.
"Oh. 1 see," Finney responds; TN
to get the rubber ball" And so the
laugh is transferred to the principal
! comedian.
= x X
A brief paragraph as to the coinci-
dence through which those plays in a
week resemble one another in subject.
1t has come by chance altogether. Yet
1 have known charges of plagiarism to
be credited on less convincing evil
| dence. The tendency Of the time is TO
depict the foibles of modern society on
the stage. About the most obvious of
these is the fashionable wOman's waste
and want of money. What wonder
then, that one man in Paris and two
women In New York should stimuli
taneously take up that manifest evil
to exploit theatrically? A dozen more
/ plays wouldn't exhaust the theme.
! Which is Gus Rogers and which is
Max? Likely Maud Raymond knows
she being the wife of one. No conse-
quence in dramatic art depends on the
answer. They are funny fellows paired,
and who cares if the smaller one is
Gus or if he is Max, so long as he con-
/ tinues to thrust his interrogatory nose
up close TO the bigger ones exclama-
tory mouth in vacuous ignorance
i German-American dialect teams have
been made up in that way of cross
4 matching since Lew Fields and Joe
I Weber passed themselves up from vau-
OeVllle 10 DuTleSQue. Inc Sflaller part
ner is always the Patsy Bolivar of the
firm. The brothers Rogers dubbed uI
from BoweTy dregs to Broadway froth
when their dialogues were a speciality
in a musical farce all the rest of which
failed miseTably; so the manager put
them forth as star comedians; and
from that time to this they have ap-
peared annually in a new gamboI
from THE Rogers Brothers in Wall
Street" through six in other places to
THE Rogers Brothers in Panama; Z
and don't you see the value of titles
that compel newspapers to name the
actors every time they refer to Their
play? McNally, author of the series
until now Mcguire and Hoffman take