"THE CRUSHED TRAGEDIAN."

Observer, Volume 7, Issue 338, 30 May 1885, Page 13

"THE CRUSHED TRAGEDIAN."

The late H. J. Byron's " Crushed Tragedian" succeeded "Impulse?' at .the Opera House on Saturday, and. proved a genuine success. ' Mr Wybert Reeve's Fitzaltamouirfc is one of his funniest impersonations^ exhirbiting the wonderful versatility of the actor, whose " Crushed Tragedian " with his Shakespearian quotations, his melodramatic " busiuess " and tragic attitudes stands out; in .strong, contrast to the crafty and treacherous Fosco. Fitzaltaniourit is playeJ with genuine humour, and making due allowance for exaggeration, might have been studied from the life. Mrs Chippendale plays up to Mr Eeeve splendidly, and her Mrs Grulpin was as natural as it was amusiug. The plot of the "Crushed Tragedian" has "been already very fullydescribed in the dailies, snd it will therefore be unnecessary to say much about it here, further than it is a tale of theatrical life, and affords the public the opportunity of taking a peep behind the scenes. The Misses Deorwyn succeeded in confirming the favorable impression made :by their acting in " Impulse " and other pieces. Mr Lachlan. McGrowan was quite at home as the manager of the Theatre Royal, Snaggleton, and Messrs Holloway, Gladstone, and Steel are. to be congratulated on their clever acting, Mr Holloway especially. His make-up and '.' business " were excellent. Mr Mandeville, of the Polygon Theatre, was ably., represented by Mr Harrison, and Mr Richard Stewart enacted the drunken Captain Racket (of the Rhinoceros Irregulars) in. a sufficiently humorous way. Of course Mr Reeve was the life and soul of the piece, and his "Crushed Again" never failed to bring down the house.

Reinenyi goes to Victoria. The Baldwins are at Wellington. Webb's Marionettes are in Hob art. Thompson's Soudan "War Diorama will shortly arrive. The Pollards have been playing successfully in Dunedin. Wyberfc Reeve as the ' Crushed Tragedian. * " is irresistibly funny. . The Millis-Hart Combination was afc latest dates delighting the Wellingtonians. Fleming Norton, the talented caricaturist, left for the Waikato on .Thmsday last. Kudarz, the illusionist, - assisted by Miss Haidee, are playing at the Wellington. Lyceum Hall. Every time Patti sings she gets, according to the best information, £800 in clear cash, or a cheque, and she makes it fly. The " tfun on the Bristol ". troupe are tra • veiling overland from Sydney to Melbourne, playing en route. " . A telegram received in town from Profeseor Rice, states that he has been doing big hiz. in Tauranga, and that he is going on to Opotiki — Auckland to follow. "The Shaugraun'' has been played to good business by the Silver King Company, in Wellington. " Coming Home ; or, Sithors to Orind," will be produced nest. Baldwin professes to have detected a great many frauds in the course of his career bymeans of his mind-reading gift. He should have plenty of scope for the exercise of his power in Auckland. For to-night (Saturday) "Diplomacy" is announced. This drama, like " Impulse," has been an extraordinary success at Home, and is said to bo one of the best pieces in. the Reeve wpertoire, Iheatrical punctuality is enforced by law in Peru. Lately the Lima police authorities fined the manager of the Italian Opera £1 os for not raising the curtain exacily at the appointed hour. jßanmin, the showman, is but a little over seventy. Prom his long connection with, itinerant show life, he is generally supposed to be much older. Of the twenty millions o£ dollars he has made, he has managed to save three. George Lingard writes from Londah that he hoped to leave per Tongariro. for New Zealand,, on April 9th, hriuging with him one of the finest dioramas ever painted. This he calls " The Royal Diorama of Scotland and of the Soudanese War." > The Clarendon Hotel is overflowing with ■ theatrical visitors. The Wybert Reeve Fleming Norton, Professor Rice, and Woodyear's Circus Companies are all represented there. The hostelry is very popular with the profession. During Professor Rice's trip through the Waikato, Maoris everywhere shunned him. He showed a native at 1 Cambridge his handkerchief trick. A soon as ifc was done the Maori went away, and could not be induced to return to town until the Professor had taken his departure. That conscientious as well as charming actress, Mdlle llhea, says she intends to be cremated, and to have one-half of her dust deposited in. Nebraska, and the other half in her native Belgium, thus showing her readiness to appear in two parts in the concluding tragedy. A Boston .amateur' dramatic society wa&. recently rehearsing a play ; under the supervision of au actor, who, in the course of the' rehearsal, severely reprimanded one of the young ladies for inattention ; whereupon the injured young woman buftt into tears, and told him he was no gentleman to address a . lady so. " Shut up,| t said the irate manager,, "you're not a lady now, you're an actress,". and the > play went on uninterruptedly to the\ end of the rehearsal.

Charles Bright again in Auckland. Some of the veterans in the "Royal Corps" are over 70 years of age ; one old boy is said to be over 80. Not a " drunk " at the Thames on the Queen's Birthday. The boys drank little, thinking it best to Leavitt alone. A local poet has sent us a poem on the stopping of his clock. It came to him, D£r- * haps, as a melancholy reminder that he could get nothing more on tick. * The Bulgarian parsons have " struck," and the places of worship are closed throughout the principality. The cause of the strike is the non-payment of stipends by the government. Otahuhu has its Mrs Partington. This lady on a recent occasion said : " When I feel faint I says to myself, ' Well, it's the liemi-. sphere ; it's so depressive on nervous affections.'" . . A bald-headed man fainted the other day in a Queen-street hair-dressing saloon, and was naturally indignant when coming to at hearing the barber exclaim, •' Give him hair ! give him hair !" White women in Suva are obliged to carry firearms now to protect themselves from the assault of the Fijian natives. No white woman is safe out of the well-lighted main street after dark. A Timaru paper says the local Borough Council is getting into a shocking state of , disorganisation. Too much talky-talky and top little work. Unfortunately Timaru is not peculiar in its councillors. Parnellites are indignant with the obstructionists who have opposed the laying of the tram rails through their little township, and with reason. What the tram is doing for Ponsonby it will do for Paraell. The number of fires occurring in Canterbury is beginning to alarm the insurance people down there. One prominent English company has decided to give Canterbury " best," and others talk of following suit. Auckland's Hallelujah lassies have been the round of the pubs during the past week endeavoring to show the unregenerate the error of their ways. The publicans are glad to see the ladies. "They always draw a full bar. A man who addressed a Blue Eibbon meeting held in Dunedin the other night said the glass of whisky he had taken that morning was "like a torchlight procession going down his throat." Always understood Dunedid whisky was celebrated for " biting all the way down." " An Onehunga resident informs us that the streets of the Borough are over-run with stray cattle ; even Queen-street, the principal thoroughfare, is never free from wandering, cows and horses grazing about the footpaths, to the great inconvenience and annoyance of the residents. Where is the ranger ? Some moa stories reach us from Waikaia, Southland. A party out mustering on the Waikaia ranges saw footprints in the snow leading them to the supposition that real live moas had not long before passed that way. Here's a chance for the enterprising owner of the " little horse." A Scotchman, who had lived many years in sunny Australia, and had become a lover of its wines, on a recent trip, to the old Country, asked a storekeeper at a country town if lie had any <! sauterne." " Nae," replied the old stay-at-home, " I hae nae saut hern, but I nae plenty of Finnan haddies." .Mr Thos. Bracken gives the poet Wills a flattering notice of his "Bunch of Wild Pansies " in the Dunedin Herald. " The Pansies," says Mr Bracken, " are not mere jingling rhymes or halting verses, but poems." Praise from " Paddy Murphy " is praise indeed. In Cape Colony, when previous convictions have been recorded against an individual, his grpg is stopped, and the policeman who serves the publicans with the notice not to supply the thirsty one with grog takes the party along with him, so that the bonifaces may know their man. Some such plan is badly wanted in New Zealand. The Bible Church of Salford (England) makes vegetarianism as well as teetotalism and total abstinence from tobacco an essential condition of its church membership. We only want a society now to interdict eating or drinking anything,' and we shall get as near perfection as any poor creatures can attain in this wicked world. At the late meeting of the Hospital Committee a letter was read from residents of Graftbri Road calling attention to the nuisance existing in the grounds of the Old M.en's Refuge. The Refuge .is on the way to the. Hospital, and the stench arising from the grounds must be highly prejudicial to the health of the inmates of the Refuge and to the neighbouring householders. _The members of the Wellington Exhibition Committee had to ; elect judges for needle-, work, etc., , the other day.. Some of the com-mittee-men displayed a lamentable ignorance on the subject of knitting, sewing, " cutting,' and paper patterns, At length. it was decided that .the. assistance of the ladies was indispensable, and a jury of the " deali creatures "• was made up. ; . .- . ■ -.-.

- - "T am quite prepared "to get married if that would be any recommendation," wrote an applicant for a billet to the Taranaki Education Board the other day. The Board considered that a man who could talk in that cool way of matrimony must be a resolute fellow, and put his name on their list.

A man at the Takapuna races on Monday, who was asked to have a drink, solemnly remarked that he thought there were only two occasions in life when a man was. justified in drinking, One was when he had taken salt fish for dinner ; the other was when he had not. "It happened," he went on to observe, "that the present was one of those rare periods, and under the circumstances he would have a drink with much pleasure." The Wellington correspondent of the Referee, in referring to the drawing of a Wellington consultation, says : — " A list of the tickets not represented in the drawing was at my suggestion published by the promoter. This should be insisted on by all subscribers in consultations, as it very frequently happens that country subscribers forward returns which arrive too late for the drawing. The consequence is that unprincipled consultationists quietly pocket the amount, and the owners of the tickets remain in ignorance as to whether their numbers were placed in the box or not." Yawners should be warned by the sad experience of a Campbelltown (Rangitikei) woman the other night. She was lighting her candle to go to bed when she gave a prodigious yawn — and was horrified to find that she couldn't shut her mouth, again ! Friends and neighbours ran in, all sorts of remedies were tried, but nothing would make that woman shut her mouth. Her husband said it was useless for him to attempt it, he had tried it often enough. Finally the sufferer was driven off to Bulls, 17 miles away, when a doctor quickly closed the gaping jaws.