MUSIC AND THE STAGE

Star (Christchurch), Issue 17027, 28 April 1923, Page 8 (Supplement)

MUSIC AND THE STAGE

BY THE LIMELIGHT MAN

The many friends of Mr Scott Colville throughout the Dominion will be glad to learn (says the “ Sporting and 1 tnatic. Review ”) that he is once /© cpnvalescent, after being seriouslndisposed for some weeks, and hopes > be about again shortly. One of the most remarkable comedy and acrobatic turns seen for quite a long time in New Zealand is the performance of Mello and Nello in tne Williamson “ Forty Thieves” pltitomime. Mello is the nom-de-tilfeatre of Monsieur Cervi, and Nello hides the identity of Signor Perigiione, a clever Italian strong man. Mello first appeared in vaudeville at the age of nineteen, and toured with another famous artist as Great and Good. Later he partnered with Periglione, and created the present extraordinary combination of acrobatics and comedy. The war, however, broke up the combination, and the two never met until after the armistice, when they coupled up again with greater success than ever before. “ Stiffy ’ 5 (Mr Nat Philips) and “Mo” (Mr Roy Rene) and the members of the supporting company, who have drawn crowded houses in Auckland, have proved on© of the greatest attractions Fullers have sent to New Zealand. In a letter to the theatrical writer of the Wellington “ Times,” a Sydney correspondent says : “ They are -real artists. They dispense real fun, and they are liberal with the doses, too. With Queenie Paul and Mike Connors you have a quartet hard to beat in any part of the world—and I have travelled some. Relieve me, when they come “to your city make a date of it—and don’t miss them. Sir Benjamin Fuller told me that Stiffy and Mo delved deejjer in a humorous way vkan perhaps the casual observer imag-

nied. I have seen and heard, and I agree they are real artists, and in their own line they are at the top of their profession.” The Melba grand opera tour of Australia, it is reported, will begin towards the end of this year instead of being held back till 1924. A few operas which have not yet been given in Australia are promised. Oscar Asche secured th© biggest booking in Perth qyer recorded in the theatrical history fo that city. As a matter of fact, the record would be hard to beat anywhere in , Australia except for grand opera at hi£h prices. In one week over £4OOO worth of seat® were taken up for the three productions, “Cairo,” “ Clin Chin Chow,’ ’ and “ Julius Caesar. 5 * One of the immediate effects of keener competition in theatrical affairs in Australia is the reduced scale of charges which Mr Hugh Ward announces for his dramatic season at the Palace Theatre. A distinction is made between four distinct classes of performance, higher prices being charged on Saturday evening and on holidays. For ordinary evening performances the charges range from six shillings to a shilling, and for Saturday and Wednesday matinees from four shillings to a shilling. “ I have never got tired of playing Dad, yet,” says Bert Bailey, who has again heard the call of the stage, and is back at the Grand Opera House in his old favourite part (says the Syd ney “Sun.”) “I have played him thousands of times, and I feel_ as if I want to be Dad as long as T live. ‘On Our Selection ’ is the only play I know cf that will stand reviving •

again and again. In this respect it on its own. Steele Rudd covered every outback type. There is light buffoonery in parts of the play, and some people consider that the characters are slightly oarioatured. Nevertheless, there is a foundation of trutu in them. These types really do exist. That is really the reason the ‘ Selection ’ has come to say. Plenty of Da/es are known to the public, and 1 can find you a 4 Dad ’ in real life right here in this town.” The award has been made in connection with th© prize play competition arranged by the Sydney “ Daily Telegraph.” Two hundred and sixteen plays were submitted to the judges— Mr Oscar Asohe, Professor MacCalluin. and Mr W. Farmer Whyte (editor or th© “ Daily Telegraph.”) Some writers sent in several plays, and the general level of ability shown is said to be high. The winner of the first priz© (£100), Miss Betty Hiscocks, though not Australian by birth, fulfilled the requirements of the competition, having spent ten years there, mostly in Western Australia, where she arrived at the age of two with her parents. Her play, “The Spirit of Desire,” shows, it is said, a vivid imagination and a knowledge of stage craft. Mr Louis Stone won the second prize with the “ Lap of the Gods,” and Mr Coulson Davidson and Miss Millicent Armstrong .were bracketed together as of equal merit for third place. Lessees of London theatres can demand anything these days. According to New York “ Variety,” producers have to guarantee them anywhere from £4OO to £BOO weekly, and in addition, in most cases, 50 per cent of tlie profits of the show in town and on tour. Lily Langtry, the English actress and once famous beauty, known the world over as “ the Jersey Lily,” who has been in retirement for years, is anxious to return to the stage. She fears, however, that it will be difficult to find a suitable part, because “ they are all flapper plays now.” She is seventyA Vienna cable message states that ‘The Children of Don,” the first Eng lish opera ever produced there, by Mr Joset Holbrooke, was well received by the audience. The Press criticisms, however, were most unfavourable. The music is described as “ poor, hollow and lacking colour and invention.” Mr Holbrooke is a well-known composer, conductor and pianist. ‘ The Children of Don ” was first produced at the London Opera House in 1912. Jean Gerardy’s ’cello is valued at £IO,OOO. “ You want to know the history of the ’cello,” be said to a Sydney interviewer. “ Well, it belonged to Lord Norton, and bad been in his family for ever so many years. It

had not been played upon for eighty yeans when 1 got it. It is a priceless instrument, and its date in 1710. Hart and Son, of London, made me a replica of it. This I use on sea voyages and at other times when it would not be wise to expose the original.” Gerardy made his re-appearance in Sydney after an absence of twenty years, on April 14.

In the backwater of drab streets north of Oxford Street, London, the grst of a series of children’s variety performances, probably unique in theatreland, was given recently at the Children’s Theatre. The performers were twelve little girls, from nine to thirteen years old (only one was actually thirteen), who live in the Soho district. They danced delightfully, sang old English folk carols, revived long-forgotten Cockney songs, and acted a small sketch, “ Love and Friendship,” by Jane Austen. The Children’s Theatre scheme is an attempt to give an opportunity for natural expression to the child’s love of the dramatic, and the work is carried on by free classes.

One hundred years ago next May 8 “ Home, Sweet Home,” was sung in public for the first time. The melody caine in the second act of an opera called “ Clari, or the Maid of Milan,” produced at Covent Garden, London. The libretto was written by a wandering American actor, John Howard Payne, and the music was composed by Sir Henry Bishop. The opera died anu was soon forgotten, but the centenary of the imperishable song it bequeathed to the English speaking world is to be observed in London. Leading musicians

have expressed hope that the anniversary will be observed by singing the song at concerts throughout the world A New Zealander. Mr E. J. Wilson, of Devonport, Auckland, has been doing remarkable acrobatic and balancing feats in London (says a Home writer.) He balances himself on his hands, with feet in the air, and on the very top of the big Y.M.G.A. building in Tottenham Court Road He lias even walked on his hands on the edge of the coping of a six-storey building—a feat which naturally commended itself to the movies, and has been filmed in one of the “Round the Town ” (Gaumont) pictures. Mr Wilson will tour England and Scotland and other countries before his return to New Zealnd. At present he is appearing at some of the halls of the Moss and Stoll circuits—the other week lie w as at Chiswick Empire. Mr Wilson acts as partner to his former trainer, Mr Van de Peear. The total ages -of fourteen ‘‘ veterans” -who appeared at the London Palladium recently in a. special variety show, are said to reach COO years, but (says a London writer') they show little signs of it in their work. The old songs go with a rare swing an known to more modern acts, and the audiences sing the choruses as lustily as they did in the old days before musichalls became vaudeville palaces and boredom a fashionable pose. Charles Bignell sings “ What Ho, She Bumps ” ; Thom Costello once again laments that at Trinity Church he met his doom ; Leo Dryden renders the “ Miner’s Dream of Home ” : Arthur Roberts takes the audience into his confidence about a lady friend who is living with her mother now-; Louie Freear explains that she badly wants to be a lady, and every other man and woman in the party contributes a number which was being whistled and sung, all over London twenty or thirty years ago. Bernard Shaw*, was the only dramatic critic of tlie first rank who doubted the genius of Bernhardt (writes a Sydney “Bui letin ” correspondent.) He had the unique experience of having seen her and her great rival. Duse, in the same piece, “ Magda,” in London in 1893. and his camporison between the two is one of the most penetrating bits of criticism he ever wrote. The plainness of Duse, who played without make-up, without artificiality, . or any recognisable stage gesture, set a standard of achievement which the Frenchwoman, with all her greasepaint, spotlights and adroitly-contriv-ed entrances and exits, failed, in hi? estimation, to reach. Wliat was mar vtellous to Shaw was that Duse had such a fund of natural emotion. He has put it on record that he actually saw her blush, when, as Magda, she

unexpectedly met her old protector again. But it has to be said for Sarah that she was forty-eight when Shaw saw her, whereas Duse was thirtyfour.

THE DIVINE SARAH.

Last week’s notices of Sarah Bernhardt. with their repeated allusions to her greatness as an actress and a citizen. reminded me oi something 1 once said impulsively to a stranger seated beside me at the little Garrick Theatre, London (writes a Sydney “Bulletin” correspondent). The curtain was just falling on the second act of “ Lady Frederick,” in which Ethel Irving had been stung to fury by the other woman's insults. I said to my neighbour, “ Sarah Bernhardt never acted like that!” He admitted rather grudgingly that Lady Frederick’s outburst had taken him bv surprise, considering that Miss Irving had been playing secondary parts in musical comedy. From my British point of view—and no man can fully appreciate histrionic art save iu his native tongue—Bernhardt never acted like Ethel Irving at her best. How she may have appeared to French folk, able to follow every weird and nuance of intonation in her rapid utterance —so rapid that she was rarelv quite intelligible to the average Britisher who “speaks French”—l know not. I speak of the much-travel-led Bernhardt, famous in England, America and other English-speaking countries long before she came to Australia in 1891, and drawing with her name a public which for the most part understood hardly a word that she oilier company uttered. Herself was the hardest of the lot to follow, though her gestures, of course, were most expressive. Of Bernhardt’s work in the lialfdozen plays she staged in Australia my recollection is that she scored her chief artistic success as Camille, the consumptive courtesan, and Theodora, the highly improper empress. Her Cleopatra, in Sardou’s drama of that name, was distinctly less of a regular royal Egyptian queen than we had looked for. The fact was she suited every character to her personality, and played, as far as one could understand the performance, for broad effects, rather than fo*“ subtle appeal to our foreign understanding. The force of her personality was as unquestionable as the charm of her voice. For thirty-two years the picture of Bernhardt standing with outstretched arms on the stage of Melbourne Princess’s, in response to a roar of welcome, has remained, vivid in mv memory. She was then forty-six at the most, plumper far and more seductively graceful than the Sarah who first took London by storm, and wonderfully magnetic on account of—as I afterwards learned—her exceeding nervousness.

She had never been so nervous as on this first night of her appearance be fore an Australian audience, we were told. r 11 lien she spoke she was bewitching. The “golden drone” was all it had been alleged to be. Her incidental comments and pleased remarks were caresses. I heard a man of limited means protest in all sincerity that he’d like to give Bernhardt a fiver to talk to him for ten minutes whilst hs smoked a cigar. But neither her voice, nor her personality, nor her love and death scenes, explained the financial success of Sarah’s visit to Australia, a risk taken by Abbey and Grau by ar rangement with the eld Williamson firm. She was not. in my reckoning, so * wonderful in acting as superlative in i self-advertisement. She had been more • talked about for twent-y years than any ’ contemporary actress. If I was not I familiar with the name of Sarah Bern ; hardt previous to the outbreak of the , Franco-Prussian war in 1870, I certainly ate numerous paragraphs about her soon after the establishment of the Third Republic. Her exceeding thinness became a standard theatrical joke. Sarah's tame tiger pup, Sarah’s amateur sculpturing and Sarah’s coffin were written of in all Paris letters to London papers in the early ’seventies. 1 smiled to read the other day that Sarah's coffin had been lying in readiness for thirty years. Why, it must be considerably more than forty years since we were told of the lady having received a press interviewer whilst she lay in her coffin—presumably the same rosewood casket wherein she was buried recently. When there was nothing else to do in the way of notoriety, she gave a display of fireworks with ! her temper, like many other stage and ! platform artists. She made a specialty j of profusion in money matters. Often- | times the 100 sovereigns piled up beside j her breakfast plate every morning of her Abbey-Grau tour were spent in call ing attention to her extravagance. On the last morning of her stav in Sydney she lavished mere than £3O on toys for the hotelkeeper’s little daughter. But there was a lot of business method in Divine Sarah’s madness. A hundred pounds a performance, with contingencies which brought her Australian income up to a considerablv higher figure, was a verv good holidav navment in 1891. Had Sarah’s hereditary Jewishness been more civilised she would doubtless have died rich in spite of her gaudy expenditure. But she was of Romany extraction : the gipsv was in l*er blood and in her eccentricities of diet. Who but a gipsy would have eaten twelve hard-boiled eggs whilst conducting a morning rehearsal of a oTav? A wonderful woman, and in nothing more wonderful than in her can-v -ity for doing th© things that one ought to do to get talked about, and leavingundone the things that don’t matter for advertisement purposes.