The Montgomery advertiser., 1909-11-14

I
 Frank Daniels has been permitted to do as he pleases with the role of
 bankrupt Paris marquis who, to re- plenish his fortune. undertakes to 1 marry his son to the heiress belle of Brittany. He is merely and altogether the American jester that he was
 when Charley Hoyt took him from
 negro minstrelsy to be the villager
 who. in "The Rag Baby" revered his
 right hand because 1t had been ciasp-
 ed by John L. Sullivan. the champion slugger. He makes his songs count
 for Ievity by giving a travesty Of his inability to sing them. And his be- tween-act speech of meaningless long words Is a feature, with his mute ap- 2, peals to a friend In the wing to pro- tect him against an enemy aioft in the flies Of course. he doesn't gee with the English play, or those Englisn players in the company; but that doesn't seem to matter. His own odjity wins out
 | Is the stage to be uplifted from the very bottom or dropped lower? IS 1 what we now call burlesque, and used to know as female minstrelsy. to be flung upward with a Parisian kick, or stamped downward? The sort of show formerly classed as burlesque. and running along In rhymes and | puns, developed into musical farce. with the old element of travesty dis placed by vaudeville interpretations and | spectacular extravaganza. Meanwhile. | female minstreIsy eliminated It's first | part, in which the only men were the | jokers at the semi-circle's ends, while | a stately woman was the interlocutor I at the middle. and the rest of the row was young women with skirts so short | ho xUifbnt1f | hiding the legs of either chairs or | person. In place of the discarded | minstrelsy. the programs give musi- | cal farce in rough and usually tough | imitation of those In theatres of the first class. There you have the evolu- | tion of the present burlesque show as | given this season by eighty-one tour ing companies.
 Now about the new Partisan prom lise of deviltry in burlesque. It comes | of ZieffoIdian drafts from the stage reviews Tn Paris, first for his Anna Held shows, later extending to oth- CTS, and consisting mainly Of girls frisky at one or another of the wick . ed resorts supported by tourists in | the French capital. It was possible for me to see within a single week performances entitled Gay Parisites, "Girls of the Moulin Rouge Queens of the Jardin de Paris" Girls of the Boulevardes." Gay Grisettes." Coy Cocottes." French Folliettes' and | "Parisian Widows" In some cases those names belonged to the compa- niesJ and in others to the plays. My hard job covered the afternoons and evenings of four days, and took me to the ends of Bronx and Queens bor- oughs; for l went only to burlesques branded French, as I was finding out whether the labels meant anything. l In the first of these eight shows. a | scene in a notorious Paris restaurant | had one truth to its credit-although not by artistic design; for some sing ing and dancing cocottes, as chic as | the genuine. were rollicking with l American visitors but they were not tourists, but the usual Yankee yap. German gawk. Irish idiot and Jewish jay of our burlesque. There was a | variant dude, though. for after his effeminacy had been used in worn out ways that tickle the multitude, but sicken me. he suddenly developed the courage and muscle to do up his tor | mentors. The audience was struck dumb by that departure from burles- que standards, and for awhile watch ed 1t in ominous silence; but when the strengthened weakling from New York knocekd out a gigantic French cop. parquet and gallery united in loud acclaim.
 A real improvement in burlesque Is wrought by transfer-through pur- chase, not theft---of scenes that have served their purpose in musical farces, This secondhand material is much better than the stuff made originally for these cheap shows; that's of course; but there is a surprise in the l clauarnaSa of tha nraaanfa An- parentIy, the show girls of burlesque are much more apt than the chump comedians who accompany them, and need nothing else than expert direc- ton to be comparable with the sirens who are petted in Broadway.
 | For example, the "Parisian widows start out with stageful of young women in black gloves and black stockings as long as the limbs they encase. Those lengths of jet arms anC | legs presumably stand for the widow
 hood mentioned In the bills; while tn, figures as a whole are reminiscent O. the times when female minstrels were nicknamed chairwarmers. but were in
 ert enough to engender frost rathel than heat. They go through the spel | of first disclosure with all the inani
 mate stolidity of Amazons in tn, marches of The Black Crook" I an discouraged and l drowse. Furthel along in Fun in a Department Store though. l am wakened by something | familiar It is a scene from The Cir
 Behind the Counter" one of the expen
 sive and prosperous musical farces O.
 the season before laHt in Broadway.
 Do my eyes and ears deceive me? | 1t a delusion? Here are three of tht impudentIy supine creature of the coarse 1 opening stunts doing real acting a the shoppers who have troubled wttl an amateur salesman at the sodi fountain. Did you see it when Lew Fields was that blunderer? and Connie Ediss, a celebrity from London. wa the woman who. being dosed with whis
 key in the carbonic fizz. had an hy
 sterical jag, and went off screaming
 Well, here are the pair of modisl | shoppers who match by colored rib
 bons the syrups they want, and do 1 with the air of the original couple O Tenderloin favorites; and l braced my self for a slump when the Connie Ediss of the incident strikes into thu action. But the fun doesn't go tt pieces The bill says 1t Is Mat | Frank who holds it up remarka bl! ike Connie. Some one was sent by J='
 sellers of the material to teach he
 and the two others how to use 1t: an' | the superior ductility of woman doe
 the rest; for the Lew Fields substitut
 at the soda fountain is dull and heav! as lead.
 Managers of burlesque evidently be
 lieve that their public demands inde
 a