THE MODEST CHORUS MAN.
Owners of Bass and Tenor Voices are Regarded As Necessary Evils by the Producers of Musical Comedies.
We hear much of the chorus girl, but very little of the chorus man, who is no doubt considered by the manager a necessary evil, inasmuch as girls are not endowed, outside of dime museums at least, with bass and tenor voices. I know one of the four chorus men who made an oasis of deep tones in the blossoming garden of Weber & Fields’s girls, but he soon was promoted from the ranks to a principal part and is now reaping profits as a writer of comic songs.
He went into the business because he wanted to go on the stage, and found this the easiest door to it. Why do other chorus men take up the thing, I asked myself, and to find out, I proceeded to get acquainted with two young fellows in the George M. Cohan company, where chorus work is a very important feature of the proceedings.
“Why did you take up this line?” I asked outright of one fellow, a big-boned chap who was formerly a cigarmaker in Chicago.
“Because I wanted to see the world,” he replied. “That’s the reason I prefer one-night stands to long runs.”
“But you must run up against some hard ones in the way of dressing-rooms among the small towns of the country,” I reminded him. And then I told of some “Florodora” girls I had heard about who were each assigned a chair on which to make their half-dozen or more changes of costume.
“Oh, exclaimed the former cigar-man, that’s nothing. I’ve had to dress on the turn of a stairs, where the bend made an extra wide step.”
“How easy is it for a man to get into the chorus?” was my next query.
“If he has a good second bass or high tenor voice, it’s a cinch.”
I then discovered that physique counts more than it used to, not good looks, for make-up will cover freckles or sallow skin, but a fellow must be well-built, and know how to hold himself.
The other chap, also from Chicago, used to be in the electric business, but with his brother he happened to belong to a lodge of the Order of the Maccabees. They could both sing and dance, and at an entertainment of the lodge did so in public. This put the stage bee in the head of the younger, and through cheek and shameless recitations of utterly fictitious engagements he had already filled, he procured a chance to do Pish-Tush in a “Mikado” company that stranded after two performances.
Prevarication, in fact, seems to be the order of the day in the theatrical business, so that I cannot for the life of me make out why one member of the profession should ever believe what the other says, knowing the rule of the road, as it were, and what he would say himself under similar circumstances.
This Earl Stanley (the grandiloquent stage name my second chorus friend chose for himself) knew nothing about making-up and learned it by deftly following the motions of the man he was assigned to dress with, who actually remarked on the newcomer’s aptness in the art.
“You two fellows,” I observed, “were lucky to get an all-summer engagement with ‘The Governor’s Son’ on the roof, after ‘George Washington, Jr.,’ closed. All the chorus men were not held over, by a long shot.”
“All the good ball players were,” replied Lisle, and then it came out that Cohan is a baseball fiend, and to play good ball, all other things being equal, assists a man in getting a job in his companies, each of which sports its nine.
Oh, as to a chorus man’s pay, it ranges from eighteen to thirty dollars a week, all costumes being furnished by the management.