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Observer, Volume XXXV, Issue 49, 14 August 1915, Page 18

The Dominion tour of the picturedrama "Neptune's Daughter" has bSrepeateV ft tlie lonj runs in Australia Aithe nresent time tbree copies ot_ JNep

"Neptune's Daughter" takes two and a-half hours to unfold. Miss Kellerman is shown "at home" in the water, surrounded, with a cast which 'brihgjs the pictured story vividly before the eye. The picture was filmed in the Bermuda Islands. The beauty of the Bermudan shore under and above water, together with the startling developments of the story, is elaid iio make "Neptune's Daughter" entirely different from anything that has been exhibited on the screen.

Scriabine, the famous Russian composer and pianist, died on April 27 at Moscow, his premature end being apparently caused by blood poisoning.

Miss Beatrice Day's only sonj Robin Wall, aged 20 years, has been granted a commission, and is a second lieutenant in the third battalion of the Lincolnshire Regiment.

It appears that John Phillip Sousa, the famous American bandmaster, has declared' that bands are responsible for this most terrible war, by reason of the romance and glamour thrown around the subject by means of martial music. It may be. John Phillip Sousa has had a good innings himself.

According to news from Honolulu, the composer of the music, "It's a Long Long Way to Tipperary," lives there, and her name is Mrs Alice Smythe Burton Gay. The music was written some years ago for a Yakiniia apple fair, and is copyrighted.

London's most volatile comedian, Seymour Hicks, is in the Bankruptcy Court. His financial troubles, he says,"started five years ago, when his debts amounted to £58,000. Since then he had paid off £45,000, "including every shilling I was supposed to be earning by fat musichall contracts." If the war had not come along and ruined his production of "Broadway Jones," reduced his music-hall contracts to one-third of their original value, and done various other unkind things, he would have been "all right" by now. Hicks has the sympathy of people on both sides of the footlights, ber cause his debts were contracted in legitimate theatrical enterprises. He has for years been earning £350 a week, but has not touched it—he assigned the money to his creditors. He was a member of three theatrebuilding syndicates that planned out badly, and the "sudden cessation of the theatre habit" caused by the war resulted in a crisis' and a dreadful warning to boardbighouse ladies.

These stage-struck folk have no lack of nerve. In Canada recently one of them wrote to a Canadian manager. Said he: "I am the makings of an actor, being the handsomest man -here." The manager g rep l y : _<<Dear Sir,—Your King and Country need you,"

By means of a tax of a penny on every theatre ticket sold, it is hoped in Montreal (Canada) to raise £60,000 for the benefit of the local hospital®.

Ben Fuller, who came over from New Zealand to give Brennan,'e circuit a hand out of its troubles, has just bought the freeholds of the Gaiety Theatre and the Palace Hotel, and the leaseholds of the Hiiou Theatre and the Palace Hotel Arcade, all of Melbourne (according to the "Bulletin"). The figure mentioned is £150,000, and a burning desire to give Bourke Street more vaudeville is at the (bottom of it all. Big Ben!

At last advices Miss Bessie Ma.ior, remembered in past Williamson plays, was appearing in "The Argyle Case" in London, but the pJay proved, a terrible frost and was quickly withdrawn. She was playing the part of the negress cook which Maggie Moore played in Australia and New Zealand.

The London "Observer," in ■ announcing the close of Forbes-Robert-son's Americani tour at the Academy of Music,.' Northampton, Massachusetts, says that playhouse is the only municipal theatre in the Englishspeaking, world. There are at least four others in New Zealand —at Napier, Dannevirke, Hastings, and Palmerston', none of thorn seats less 1500, and the Napier Municipal Theatre, which seats nearly 3000, is one of the finest in the Southern Hemisphere.