A DRAMATIC CRITIQUE

Dominion, Volume 13, Issue 72, 18 December 1919, Page 9

A DRAMATIC CRITIQUE

BUT NOT A SERIOUS ONE. The 'season'of 1919 was ushered, in a 1 the Third Avenue Opera Howe with a revival of "I.iehc and Domiorwetter," a music-idyll in three acts by Haekenscbmult and a teni< pornrv .injunction by Justice ot the (supreme Court Perkins. - ~ It is doubtful whether, since the first production eighty-five years ago, the lovelv melodic have been rendered with'so much temperament and dash as marked tho performance from the the moment when the Fire Department trained the" hose upon the.audience m the upper-tier boxes just before the werl„rc to the last dying strains of the exquisite "Dich, dich, immer im Hcryen." When tho police reserves entered. The orchestra, under the direction of Otto Denkmal, who conducted from insde a whippet tank, gave * remarlrabta nvhibition of ensjmblo Playing, partioulnr v .at the climax of the >aclitweben in the second act, when a spectator in he third row, careless of the current ~'iee of e«K", succeeded in laying down I bunt between the French horns and "wilheiin Schmalz, as liodolfo, rose to the height' of his extraordinary dramatic rifts in the suiuTb "Sehon und tren. With a good opera glass it™* quite no's We to follow the remarkable play of"emotions in his mobile countenance throu"h the lenses of his cas mask. The cfewrd* of his pica for forgiveness he rendered with a moving tenderness from umler the table to Laura, crouchIn- behind the piano. ~ . ~ „„ If auv criticism of Mr. Denkmal s performance is to be noted, it would be a Hulen-T io an exaggerated treniolo on one occasion m the third act when severil half-portions of grapefruit happened in' arrive from the approximate direction "Vis" to he regretted that the police tound.it necessary to remove a nmnl,or of spectators before -the fall of the final enrtaiii.and so impaired the pleasure of true music lovers, whose interests 'the ordinary commuter never seems to take into consideration.