The Montgomery advertiser., 1909-01-17

VI VIII uuy youE utetuu outribHI or pay you a royalty" Charles Froh- mar, had said to her in London, but for one of its four acts only. to put Into another play"
 My work has political purpose" she replied. and must be acted all or none."
 The portion that Frohman liked is a meeting of suffragettes In Trafalgar Square. London. The heroine has suf- tered shame from her love of a man in girlhood and she has developed in- to revolutionist against all the ag- gression of men against women. She Is an eloquent advocate of the univer- sal right to vote.~ Suddenly in the pies that of the man who led her astray. The sight of him after many years rouses her to oratory that con- vinces him of one mans cruelty to one girl. That leads to their reunion in A happy marriage. By chance. ex- actiy the same motive Is used In Salvation Nell" but Mrs. Fiske per- sonates Salvation Army lass instead of Suffraeette. A congenial audi ence applauded the reading of votes for Women but aside from it's episode In Trafalgar square 1t contains no value for the stage.
 Christ Is not an acted character In "The Little Town of Bethlehem" writ ten by Spencer Tasks wife. the Kat rina Trasks of poetry, and acted dur. Ing a fortnight to make money foi several cbarities--after Ben Greet has been paid for the services of himself and his company It was Greet. you know. who presented the old morality play of "Everyman." in which the sup posed voice of God was audible and his H..A |. nation. Mrs. Trask's composition rev erently introduces the, immediate in. luence of Christ. but not allegorical- ly, In a quite sublunary story of Faus- tina. a Roman beauty. In prologue. Joseph arrives at Bethlehem with Mary, who Is Ill unto, childbirth: and he might get lodging for her at an Inn If the arrogant girl, Faustina, would but give up one of her many rooms. So Mary has to be taken to a stable. The birth of the Christ child in a manager and thes worship of him by the wise men from the East are given with few words, mainly quoted from the New Testament, and illustrated with copies of Tissot paintings.
 The play takes up the romance of Faustina's love of Cariston, a young Greek poet, whose wooing she rejects to wed a weaithySman chosen by her parents. The poet goes dlsconSolately to some distant land and the beauty becomes a ieper, to be driven into the wilderness an outcast. This is wrlt- ten Gorldly. poetically and in the the atrlc manner of the dramas of early Christianity in Rome and Greece that Wilson Darrett used to delight in so- norously. It recalls. too. that play of leprosy that Henry -Irving's son Lawrence wrote for Ellen Terry, in which beautiful woman was adored by @ painter. who wire an artists eyes admired her especially for the white translucence of her skin, not suspect ing it was the pallor of the dreadful disease that would soon make her hid- enus. Faustina has been in the obliv- ion of the "unclean" many years when Cariston learns of her plight and sets aut to find her. He would marry her and share her doom; but she will not accept the sacrifice and eludes him by flight. At length the time of Christ's miracles comes and she is healed by hlm-by the same Christ whose birth In q stable was due to her exclusion of Mary from an inn. The Small Town of Bethlehem" is likely to hold q. place In the Greet repertory. but hardly can gain general popularity.
 Jefferson de AnRells in The RehearS- al" Wouldn't that make you go into a theatre, even a vaudeville house. ex- pecting to see that funny force in a new play? It did me--in two ways it "did" me--for ""The Re- hearsaf' isn't a play at all-not so much as 0 musical farcelet-but only a few from the many things he has done iu full-lenKth shows. rm not angry because Jeff fooled me as to the na- ture of hts ,foolery; for 1t was very 6.sn Al st Yx Is longer shows. 1t Is fresh in vaudeville He gives the nrst.shve ofsffts limited twenty minutes. to tho butler and the buttons of a household to practice a song and dance for an amateur enter tainment. That leaves a quarter of an hour for Jeff, as a Professor Hamfat to hold a rehearsal with a tunefui, him. ble young Genevieve Fenley as Q lady's maid.
 The selections are a song and dance in the old-tlme team style of Dele. hanty and Hengler: a spell of grand opera with her singing an aria and him smashing a violin to bits in Sousa throes of leadership; and finally, a bur lesque melodrama with the sawmill scene of Blue Jeansf' for a climax The hero was inched along till the buzzsaw's teeth caught In his hair and tore of his wig before the heroine saved him by a stroke of an axe that not only@cut the rope. but chopped deep into his abdominal rotundity We'll, anyway, I found 1t unusual to see Jefferson de AngelIs out of some real or fake monarch in a nondescript cos tune and In the Lew Dockstader sort of big. mlsflt. open-front evening suit; and as to that vaudeville audience In It's initiatory view of him, it was In ecstasy over his every. caper, from his standing on one foot, with the other at the start to his feat of strength with stuffed muscles at the finish
 What about "A Bad Mans Wife" mentioned in my first sentence as the weeks single play produced in the or dinary course of theatrical business? It Is so priced that four of it's grade may he seen in Harlem for the cost of one play in Broadway; 1t is an earnest en- deavor by Thomas Henry to make a worthy variant in gundrama; and it's third-act acme of excitement is in a room of squalor. The bad mans wife ia sewing by a lamp. (Gas Is 6 cheaper light than kerosine In New York, but she couldn't pitifully pick up a wick in gas jet as she can in dimming lamp.) With foot she rocks the era at- aR Inlr ha hu xxyhf rv{ll tf