One seldom sees a more beautiful woman than the present commère of the Olympia revue, Germaine Gallois. She is tall, lithe and queenly, with clear-cut features and a wealth of golden hair. With Lucien Noël and the statuesque Graziella the revue is not lacking in talent. From the shadows of the wings framed by the side of the proscenium in deep shadow against the flood of orange calcium light, the glitter of the scene upon the stage seemed even more brilliant than when viewed from the house.
EMILIENNE D’ALONÇON AS A COMMÈRE
Three fourths of the performers in Parisian vaudeville are Americans, English or Austrians. These naturally can not be employed in the revue following the vaudeville, for they do not speak French.
It is the custom to print in English the billposters announcing these artists. It seems more of a novelty to Parisians if the lady on the high wire appears on the bills as “Miss Dorita Gayford, Queen of the High Wire.” In London you will see this lady who is on such good terms with the attraction of gravitation, billed as “Mademoiselle Céleste Pirrizetti, Reine du Fil de Fer.” It is more interesting, just as a “Chateaubriand aux pommes soufflées” is more attractive upon a bill of fare than plain “steak and fried potatoes.”
To us Americans who are accustomed to our modern theaters fitted with every appliance for safety and comfort, the old-fashioned playhouses of Paris, seasoned by time and tradition, seem quite primitive in construction. Many of them have remained for nearly a century materially unchanged. The narrow semi-circular corridors leading to the orchestra through little velveted doors have low ceilings.
That the most sought after seats are those in the first balcony is due to the fact that in many of the theaters the first rows in the orchestra are sunk so low below an unusually high stage that it is impossible to see more than the upper half of the performers. Then, too, the hood of the prompter’s box is invariably placed in the middle of the stage. Add to this a lady in front with a theater hat of such dimensions that it would serve much better as a sunshade, and the spectator near the front row has left to his vision a little triangular space bounded on the base by the footlights, on one side by the prompt-box, and on the other by a bobbing ostrich plume. Across this aperture, provided the ostrich feather keeps still, you may, by good luck, from time to time see the villain pursue the heroine.
The French playhouse is a slave to traditional custom. The stone stairways worn by the feet of generations of audiences have sunk badly out of plumb. There are comfortable old foyers and fumoirs to which the audience pour during the entr’actes, but the approach to these is painfully slow through narrow corridors and up winding flights of stairs.
The boxes lined along beneath the first balcony and circling the orchestra are narrow, and insufferably warm in summer. Besides the open loges there are boxes screened by grilles of gilt lattice, where madame and another madame’s monsieur may secrete themselves, discreet even in their indiscretions—but why gossip of the happiness of others?—there is enough misery in the world as it is.
Those gray-haired old ladies, the ouvreuses, are traditional, too; they hang the coats and wraps along the wall of the narrow corridor into which the audience goes out, with the result that at the end of the performance the corridor is jammed with people in search of their belongings.