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Show NEW YORK THEATRICALS FRENCH EARMARKS ON BLANCHE BATES' NEW FARCE. f "Nobody's Widow" a Goer New York Shudders V at "The Speckled Band." By FRANKLIN FYLES. New York, Dec. 2. A man makes his way into a woman's room at a Florida hotel ho-tel and spends a night with her in spite of her protests. He believes that he is her husband, hus-band, but she knows she is not his wife and resists re-sists his advances. She dreads a scandal, though, If she makes an outcry for help, and so she lets him remain. That is Avery Hopwood's pivot for the fun to whirl around in "Nobody's Widow," an American bride who caught her English bride--Jja groom kissing a girl half an hour after the mar- , riage rite and quit him before there was any real wedlock. She changed the garb of a wedding to the black of a funeral to come home and get sympathy sym-pathy instead of ridicule by saying her husband was dead. But he followed her all alive with true love; the kiss she saw was a good-bye to a discarded huzzy. Those things had happened in London before the play begins at Palm Beach. Blanche Bates shifts from serious heroines to be facetious as this runaway bride and is extremely ex-tremely deft, bright and amusing. Bruce McRae enacts the duke who chases her across the Atlan-, Atlan-, tic in quest of a delayed honeymoon. Under David Belasco's guidance they play their parts as though unaware of the audience's laughter and so make the farce go like a romantic comedy in burlesque. bur-lesque. She won't take his excuse for the kiss, nor own up that she loves him; and reluctantly she permits him to try for one week to win her 1 love over again by courting her as though this were their first acquaintance. The night of the seventh day finds her still obdurate; for he has blundered innocently into what looks like a flirta-i flirta-i tion; and he, desperate in his despair, falls back on his rights as her lawful husband. They are in I her apartment. I "This shall be your bridal night," says he. ! "You are determined to do your worst?" says I she. "No. I am in honor bound to do my best." I The commotion for a while looks like an amor ous assault by a melodrama's villain on a frightened fright-ened maiden; hut this man is so persuasive a wooer that the woman at length yields to his plea of love. Then, of a sudden, they learn that they are not husband and wife after all. A telegram from London says that a suit by her for divorce has annulled her marriage. So she has assented to conjugal relations after ceasing to be a wife. What can he done? They speed in a midnight auto-car to the nearest magistrate and get remar- " ried. The clock strikes three when, having re turned from their second wedding, they turn out k the lights and the curtain closes them in. It lifted nine times on the opening night to let Blanche Bates be applauded by a well pleased audience; t and then three times more to adulate Hopwood and Belasco. If "Nobody's Widow" had been written by a Frenchman for Parisian entertainment, that deferred de-ferred start of a honeymoon would have been las-' las-' civious. Of course. Inevitably. But as worked I out by an American none of it is indecent, or i hardly indecorous, and the result is proof that an author loses no laughter in New York by throw- ing away chances to be nasty, if only he is clever enough to make clean merriment instead. Take the incident mentioned as having rekindled the ' wife's jealousy. , Her young friend acted by I Adelaide Prince is romantic and her fiance is matter-of-fact. She longs for a sentimental ex-' ex-' ploit and makes big eyes at the duke. In a refal- (ConUnuetl on Page 10 ) NEW YORK THEATRICALS. (Continued fiom Page 7.) latory moment, to even up with his half-wife's re-pellance, re-pellance, McRae invites Adelaide to a sly supper in his room. Before the time comes he makes up with Blanche and desires to get out of the skittish engagement. Adelaide won't let him off. She has expected to have to fight off a rake's insults and dislikes to be disappointed. Her utmost recklessness doesn't go further than let him kiss her once or twice. He is chilly. Wine doesn't warm him while heating her. She hints for the kisses in vain. Finally she asks outright for one. It is a mere smack on her cheek; no caress accompanies ac-companies it; and when she presents her puckered puck-ered mouth for another, it is so Incomplete that she speaks afterward as having been kissed only once and a half. Even this opportunity to be improper im-proper is discarded in favor of permissible pleasantry. pleas-antry. I wonder if Miss Prince likes the scene in which the author makes her forego beautiflcation. Adelaide can't sleep and goes to her friend's room for a chat. Her hair hangs straight and thin. Her face is smeared with cold cream. Her nightgown is plain and unshapely. Her lover accidentally gets a sight of her. This actor, by the way, is a young Schumann-Heink, one of the nine begotten by Madame Schumann-Heink, the grand opera singer. She named the eldest after George Washington and this one after Henry Clay. He isn't a bad actor. "Good Gawd," he says, in amazement at his sweetheart unadorned; "are bridegrooms shocked like this on their wedding nights?" Here's the big shudder in "The Speckled Band." A timid girl has fearsome premonition that she will be murdered in her bedroom this stormy night. She is forced to lodge there, however, how-ever, in lonesome terror. She fastens the door and windows in dread of sinister intrusion. Yet can she shut out the peril? Her sister died there, two years ago, and a coroner could find no sign of ailment or mark of violence. The poor maiden remembers that strange murder and seems likely to die of dread. Then Sherlock Holmes comes to her aid. For this is the newest of Arthur Conan Doyle's tales of the wonderful detector. Won't he detect the source and nature of her peril? He will. His first discovery is that what looks to be a simple bell rope, dangling over the pillow where the girl is expected to lay her head, is fastened at the aperture in the wall and goes no further. What is its purpose? Manifestly Mani-festly for some sinister things to go down by. lie scrutinized the bed. Its legs are screwed to the floor. Why? Evidently so that the sleeper may not be missed by the secret enemy. He thinks hard. The master of the house is a physician phy-sician returned from India. With him has come a Hindu valet. "Also, a snake," the detective deduces; "one of those deadly reptiles that sting to kill and leave no trace of the instantly deadly poison behind." be-hind." This secret assassin will glide down the rope to thrust its fangs into the girl as it did into her sister? Well, no. Have you forgotten he presence pres-ence of Sherlock Holmes? He cuts the rope off short, turns out the lights and waits with a dark . lantern to see what the audience will behold. And the audience may think, because it is modish and sophisticated, that it isn't to be engrossed by melodrama. mel-odrama. Yet it is. How do I know? No one has betrayed a consciousness of the fact that the girl is in a nightgown. That is proof positive. The lute that charms the snake out of his box and leads him to the hole in the wall is heard from the next room. Holmes' lantern flashes a bright light on the end of the shortened rope. To it a big cobra clings squirming and coiling. He is J alive. No doubt about that. When he has had ample time to sting the girl, if unhindered, the r lute is played again to recall him. Darkness once more. Presumably he surprises his master by returning re-turning so quickly by the short rope. A scream of fright tells that the murderer by reptile proxy has been poisoned by the deadly fangs. So that the people may be sure of his capital punishment, punish-ment, he breaks into the room wildly, falls in paroxysms par-oxysms of anguish and dies dreadfully. Why doesn't the author lay the girl on the bed, have her fall asleep, let the cobra descend almost to her pillow and then make Sherlock Holmes kill the snake in the nick of time? The suspense would be more intense. Surely. So J much so that women by the dozen would go into f hysterics at the sight, or faint dead away, and the theatre would become an emergency hospital. The snake is an agent of death in the service of a demoniac, Dr. Rylon, created by Doyle, to cope almost victoriously with the celebrated Sherlock Sher-lock Holmes and acted vividly by Edwin Stevens. Rylon is guardian of two step-daughters; but when they get to be of age he will lose his graft-age. graft-age. How may he save himself from both indigence in-digence and industry? Why, kill the girls before their twenty-first birthdays. Easy answer. Hard LA TORTAJADA Famous Spanish Danscusc who heads next week's bill at the Orpheum. to do safely though, in a country or nosey police and dangling nooses. Rylon, being a medical man, naturally thinks of poison of some poison that would kill and leave no sign of those Enst Indian serpents that sting to death, but make no -j evidence for autopsies to discover.- He sends for a Hindu snake charmer to act ostensibly as his valet, and an extra and ultra poisonous cobra to be his secret assassin. You know from what I've written that the play's title, "The Speckled Band," is a trick of Doyle's to suggest a band of assassins speckled in some way or other, when really the dying girl is trying to tell of the speckled band that is the spotted snake that wound around her in the dim light of her chamber. Artful flctltionlst, that Doyle. No wonder he gave up doctoring for authorship, created Sherlock Sher-lock Holmes to vivify hundreds of detective stories and got knighted for it by Edward VII. Doyle tried his hand at a stage version of one of his stories and submitted the play to Charles Frohman. It was crude, Hut Frohman saw truly dramatic stuff in it, alor 'ith a role for his personal per-sonal crony, William Gillette, and induced Doyle J to let Gillette handle the material. The upshot was "Sherlock Holmes," with which Doyle and Gillette prospered two years, and in which Gillette Gil-lette now reappears in New York simultaneously with "The Speckled Band." Now you ask which is the better drama. In my judgment neither and both are good. And has Frohman found an equal of Gillette as an impersonator imper-sonator of Sherlock Holmes? Yes and no. Gillette Gil-lette gives more distinction to the character and Charles Millward is more effectual theatrically. Millward was brought into the cast only four days before the opening. He is ah American and not a relative of the English Jessie Millward, whose brother Hector died last year. This new Holmes smokes much as aforetime, uses a hypodermic hypo-dermic needle to steady his nerves with cocaine and has lost none of the old mannerisms. But he doesn't appear until the drama is half over. In the meanwhile, Edwin Stevens has had time and chance to dominate the action with Doc tor Rylon, a character oddly blending the plausible plausi-ble knave and the ruffianly bully one moment cajoling the surviving heiress and the next maltreating mal-treating her in an outbreak of bad temper. That menaced girl, awed by the unexplained death of her sister, and feeling that she, too, is doomed, but unaware of the snake ready to sting her is acted pathetically by a young Irene Fenwick. As you see, I recur to that cobra. He is introduced in-troduced to the audience by Rylon, but not to anyone any-one in the play, when tha Hindu brings him down to the footlights. Rylon snaps his fingers and thereat the trained snake lifts his head and a half yard of his body out of the basket. He is a fat, sleek fellow a villain scaly maybe, but polished. pol-ished. A critic next me said it was a mistake to let the reptile be seen before the later episode of the second attempt to murder with his fangs. I don't think so. Without a tip to guess the truth until the climax, the play would wear itself out in futility. As it is, we see Sherlock Holmes in a Btruggle with Doctor Rylon to save or slay the girl, but ignorant of her deadlier enemy; and the interest of the suspense is tense except with those who say pish and pshaw to all detective melodrama. |