Show 9 STAGING THE PLAYS 4 > 1 nosy TIMES FOR TIIEl MAICBRS OF AFFIA1KS T3EE EFFICIENT S JUBECHANIC BUBCrrRICHiVX CA OF LIMITLESS PATOEXCE NEW YORK Sept 11 Pretty nearly every little obscure dance hall in town is filled these bright evenings with what the neighborhood boys call the per fesh Ladies with suspiciously golden hair and with complexions of the liveliest live-liest possible order gowned in clothes of uncertain newness trip gaily in accompanied ac-companied by smooth faced gentlemen whose finery must have been quite impressive im-pressive in the early part of the summer sum-mer but which now has a chilly down attheheel look All this means that the rehearsing season is now at its height The companies com-panies which within a month or two will seek to win in rural localities golden gol-den dollars by their histrionic abilities are now learning their business The people in the bigger cities will never see them or know of their existence Perhaps about December a three line telegraphic dispatch from some distant point will appear in the newspapers notifying the world of the fact that the Great Unique Novelty company went to pieces last night at Wayoff eighteen miles from here and their baggage has been seized for board This paragraph will mean little or nothing to the average newspaper reader read-er but to a dozen weary and heartsick stage folk it will be a recital of a tragedy Every fall a couple of hundred hun-dred little show companies are organized organiz-ed in New York to go on the road I would seem that the managers of these affairs would usfe some other term than that just quoted for to the old campaigners has a literal ring tit t-it reviving painful memories of long walks to some place where enough coal be borrowed to land them in New Yorl again Of the two hundred companies which go out during September and October to lose themselves in the little byplace most of them go to piecesbefore Christmas Christ-mas A few may struggle through the whole season meeting a succession of hearty frosts but managing in som occult way to get out of every town with their properties and baggage Those of the perfesh who go through a successful campaign of this kind an heroes during the next summer months and are looked up to by their comrade who went to pieces before a month had elapsed AGONIZING REHEARSALS In their fullfledged beauty the shows which these unfortunates give I are bad enough but their rehearsal would drive any sane person crazy IT the lay mind there is always a hankering hanker-ing for the mystery of seeing actors and actresses rehearsing and those who have hadMheir hunger satisfied by viewing one of these affairs in a firstclass theatre have been bored to death inside of half an hour But the rehearsals in a firstclass theatre are nothing to compare with those now going on in dance halls and other places in the city where the floor space is large enough These latter are so shockingly bad that they are almost interesting 4 To begin with there is either no plot at all or it is so fearfully tangled up that there is no use in trying to fathom the story oIl the play The stage manager sit at a little table with the play manuscript in front of him and various plans of the different scenes spread out Then the terribly bad actors and actresses do their work I Tf J < f y rSmXT KEHEARSAILiS DULL AGE 3EAJTAGER MUST DE AJtTIST RP03XTJEE AND ACTOR AJXD A MAN Without the glamor of stage settings and clothed in their frowsy street dress almost any one would be willing to wager a million dollars t a cent that the show would fall flat before it got a dozen miles away from New York and usually he would win or come close to it In the large theatres things have amore a-more optimistic look but the outsider if he could take a peep into one of them while the wore of preparing for a new play was going on would think that everything had a dreadlfully mixed up look about it THE STAGE MANAGERS IMPORTANCE IMPORT-ANCE Staging a play nowadays is no childs task Good new plays are always al-ways scares and the fundamental work of all clever stage managers is to make a poor play seem good by the brilliancy of it trappings In the rehearsing re-hearsing he must force the players to wring every ounce of merit out of their lines and then he must work on the electrician the scenic artist the property prop-erty man the carpenter and the mas ter mechanic to devise novelties which will cover up the many weak spots lie must know how to direct each > of these functionaries and to do so he must have a detailed knowledge of their respective lines of work All stage managers in the large theatres the-atres when they take hold of a new play have what is called 8 scene plot This is a flat drawing in perspective per-spective showing each scene a it S r S f I 1Ifll F W c 1 scEivic ARJrTSrrs AT WOltit I should be set up The shape of the j I room is shown she number and location loca-tion of windows and doors and their exact style the kind of furniture and where it is to be placed the color of the hangng and the kind of ornamentations orna-mentations These latter a always chosen so as to best show off the costumes cos-tumes of the players Every large theatre has an immense amount of scenery and furniture always ways on hand and unless the new play is exceptionally like the staging of a comic opera there is usually enough for the master mechanic and the property prop-erty man to fill the bill down to the smallest details I the scenery on hand is not quite what it should be the master mechanic hauls out of the dock some of the old pieces the scenic artist is set to work on them and i > e emergency is soon met When all of the big work has been disposed of + he scene shifters are drilled to make the play move swiftly Between the the Betwen te acts everything on te stage seems to be chaotic but it i really the height of order The clean are the cheapest of the stage help tackle a scene the instant the curtain falls and while some of them brush off the furniture rugs etc others grab the walls of a room and run them off The ceiling is hoisted out of the yin y-in a trice and the next instant the shifters are running the new scene into place The scenery of a play is all kept together in one place the large scenes resting against the wall with the face turned inward That which is to be used in the last act is against the wall while that for the first act is on the outside In this way the shifters work down through the scenery from act to act with little commotion After the play the scenes are all placed in the same order again for the next performance perform-ance When a play drags on the opening open-ing night it is usually due to the unfamiliarity un-familiarity of the scene shifter with the scenic effects and they te efects now are drilled as carefully a the others |