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Show li NEW YORK THEATRICALS I BY FRANKLIN FYLES. j HR New York, Nov. 11. Sir John Fnlstaff now saunters through such a High street, in 'The HB Merry Wives of Windsor," as he has not hitherto HB since he was alive in the old English town. The Bl revolving stage of the New theatre is used to HP show, without intermissions, four adjoining por- K tions of the thoroughfare so spaciously that the B houses look full size along a living, believable Hi , highway. At first we Iaco Master Ford's house, It ' with Windsor Castle in the distance and the HI courtyard of the Garter Inn near at hand. Then H we are in front of that tavern, with the Ford HI house at the left and the castle further off. In ! short, the fat knight's stroll is not in Windsor, as H just suggested in Shakespeare's comedy, but in a Hi- solid section of the town of the Elizabethan pe- !riod. One enjoys the foolery of the merry wives and the old rake with almost the reality of a frolic in one's own neighborhood. The performance? It is worthy of its scenic setting. The point in this noteworthy revival that strikes me most agreeably is the contrast of the wives. There is nothing in Shakespeare to essentially differentiate the two dames. Yet here are the mischievous souls as dissimilar as the rough and healthy hardiness of the peony ) and the dainty fragility of the rose. Mrs. Page, H as embodied by Rose Coghlan, tricks Falstaff B with a full-blooded exuberance that carries one B along like a jolly hurricane; whereas, Mrs. Ford, B by Edith Wynne Matthison, is no less merry, yet f with a winsome, almosi. plaintive delicacy that U i gives a peculiarly alluring quality to her pranks. M One understands why her husband is so jealous Hrj of her every act. The contrast in the wives is E''; not, of course, a new invention of this distin- B i , guished management. I recall the revival by B Sir -Herbert Tree, when Mrs. Kendal was as M, buxom as Miss Coghlan, while Ellen Terry was M I as etherially lovely as Miss Matthison. fl The last time Sir Herbert appeared in "The M l Merry Wives of Windsor" in this country the m last notable revival of the comedy over here m was fifteen years or more ago. He was the Fal- IB ' staff, of course, but Lady Tree, who at that time was no longer young, was the "sweet Anne Page," with the late Lily Hanbury, a beautiful cousin of Julia Neilson, as her mother, though H she looked the girl under twenty which she was. H The New Theatre representation of the comedy B reminds me oddly of that incongruity; for, H though there is more than a quarter of a cen- H tury between the ages of Rose Coghlan and Leah H Bateman-Hunter the Mistress Page and her H daughter Anne of the present cast the un- Hj 'informed hardly would believe it. Miss Bateman- H Hunter, daughter of Harrison Hunter and grand- Hj daughter of the Kate Bateman who was famous K for her Leah, the forsaken, is so stout and ma- H tronly as to make one almost doubtful of her H youth; whereas Miss Coghlan, lss heavy than of H yore, looks as youthful as she might care to H claim herself to be. H Sir Arthur said that "comedy is a farce by a H dead author." The terse line loses its sting in H this instance. This revival of "The Merry Wives H of Windsor" treats it frankly as a farce. It am- H bles along with as frivolous a freedom as the H latest song and dance show. Yet with it all, one H is conscious of a rHh Elizabethan quality. The H whole affair is gay and flighty, yet everything H has its meaning. For example, Louis Calvert's H Falstaff is making an especially amorous avowal H to Mrs. Ford. She runs away from him. He H rises to pursue her, but he is so fat that his arm- H chair clings to him and all fervor is ruined by V the ridiculous appendage. H William Gillette in "Electricity" makes Marie H, DL , r .i. H..I nftiMMi"-- ---"- lir-jiMi'm1"" - i . -r Doro a monopolistic millionaire's daughter so r socialistic that she tries to earn her own living so as not to eat a morsel of broad that ought to go into the mouths of the multitude. The only son of a man who has taken millions from railways rail-ways by watering thei stock and milking their bonds, loves that girl at sight, but dares not introduce in-troduce himself because his excess of unearned increment Is nauseous to her. He finds out that she is inclined to dote on an electrician at work in her home, simply because he earns by toil every cent of his income. So the would-be wooer buys the mechanic's job for himself, and by that use gets at the girl in tfie guise of a workman. Marie is ordered to play the silly little socialist social-ist with all the sincerity that she can contrive to express. She prattles her theories as violently as her physical frailty will let her; and while Shelley Hull, as the electric faker, can't make the wires carry light into her home, he easily installs a dynamo that sends a current of love to the maiden's heart. She io as naive a novice in passion pas-sion as In social science, and only the demure nicety of her manner saves her from ridicule. Hull is childish, too, and the heir and the heiress seem an impossibly brainless pair of sweethearts for wealth to have cultured. She is very, very angry when informed that he isn't a genuine I worker, and has half a mind to jilt him; but on his fervid promise to become a skilled electrician and earn all the money they will live on, she consents to a marriage. Between the fore and aft ends of "Electricity" fun is made by Hull's Ignorance of the trade he pretends to work at, for he leaves the mansion to candlelight while he monkies with the electric wires and puts all his effectual efforts into courting court-ing Marie. Cross purposes grow out of misunderstandings misunder-standings until the rich girl seems to have stolen the poor one's fiance, and there is great ado of hurt hearts before the clearing up of the confusion. con-fusion. Meanwhile Marie adheres to her frantic socialism social-ism and by her crazy chatter leaves the audience in doubt whether the play is intended to help or hinder the fight of the grubbers against the grabbers. grab-bers. "Love is stronger than duty," is her tag line; but the problem of labor versus capital re-(Continued re-(Continued on Page 14.) II FRANKLIN FYLES. 101 (Continued from Pago G.) I mains unsolved. The homes of a railway mag- I neither has gained any advantage, and at the up-IS up-IS shot wealth weds wealth and poverty weds pov-II pov-II erty satisfactorily. The play is a satisfaction for I people able to perceive all its jocularity through lp its 'aspect of sobriety. I A scientific play for fun only is "The Other I' Fellow," which is not nearly the first instance of I; j j the doctrine of soul transmigration being treated Hi facetiously for the stage; but in it George Totten , Smith evolves new humor from a subject that Hjl has been taken up by many authors before him. PJlT Joseph Jefferson's son Thomas, with an acting jjjr manner that grows more and more to resemble ' the father's, plays a Wall street operator who lets '; ' out his own soul and takes in that of a physi-H physi-H t j nrie and a railway engine driver and their fam-B fam-B j I Hies have been shown in contrast, however, and ij the father of each has berated the other; but H !j ' cian. H f ' Jefferson doesn't believe that a soul can be H i j transferred from one body to another. A Theo- H 1 ' sophic physician employs a Hindu occult scien- tist to prove the theory to be a fact. The Hindu puts tho dispatents into trances and dislodges their souls. The one that belongs to the physician physi-cian goes right into the form of Jefferson, but the doubter's flies far away, no one knows where for awhile, leaving the corporeal part of its owner in a deep sleep. And Jefferson, having lost his mental men-tal outfit, gets along badly with the physician's. Jefferson represents an old man with a wife, although she is estranged, but moved by the soul of the doctor, he loves the doctor's young sweetheart. sweet-heart. That is but one of numerous troubles that arise for him. He turns from the promotion of quick-rich schemes to the practice or medicine, but sickens instead of curing patients with absurd ab-surd doses; for he isn't in full possession of the other fellow's mind; and he has lost his own expert ex-pert knowledge of financiering and gives such advice to his Wall street followers that they make fortunes while he loses. The farce is topsy-turvey absurdities. The first audience laughed less than the second because be-cause Jefferson copies his father's slowness, which is unsuitable to such a farce as this; and he sets a lazy pace for his company; but he speeded up a little with one repetition, the others followed him, and when all get to rattling along rapidly "The Other Fellow" will, it seems to me, become an exceptionally jolly show. |