Second Lady: "Positively a-a-a- Tom Fitch um-um amusing a-aitch a-aitch a-aitch!"
It puzzled me for a long time to find out what was meant by this repetition of a-aitch. It is simply the reading of laughter. A-aitch is where "the laugh comes in." The genuine pearls of laughter are reserved for the regular performance. Actresses cannot afford to cachinate during the tediousness and drudgery of rehearsal. Usually they feel like crying.
Stage Manager: "We must rehearse this last act over again."
Everybody at this announcement looks broadswords and daggers. There are some pretty pouts from the ladies, and some deep but energetic profanity from the gentlemen.
"NOW, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, ALL TOGETHER."
The California journalist has just about done justice to the subject. I have attended rehearsals when it was utterly impossible to comprehend whether they were reading Revelations or going through Mother Goose's melodies. Drilling the chorus for opera is attained by the same trials and tribulations as rehearsals for dramatic representations. The leader grows furious at the surrounding noise, and the distractions that members of the chorus give themselves up to. It is a bad thing to get them together at first and harder still to keep them together afterwards. When the leader with an atmosphere of the kindest humor surrounding his smooth head holds his baton aloft imagining that everything is all right, says: "Now, ladies and gentlemen, all together," he gracefully lowers his arm, but suddenly arises in an angry mood, for they are not all together. About one-half the throng begin, and the other half loiter behind to drop in at intervals. And so it goes from act to act until the opera is finished. The singers are in street dress and the shabbiest of garments brush against the most stylish. In rehearsing grand opera only one act is taken at a time, and the scenes presented, with the mellifluous Italian and the sweet-scented garlic floating around the stage, are picturesque to the eye, charming to the ear, and simply entrancing to the nose. The principals rehearse sitting.
TRAINING BALLET DANCERS.
Ballet dancers have as hard work, if not harder than any other class in the profession. They must rehearse or practice daily, and for hours and hours at a time. The maitre is there with cane and eye-glass, with velvet coat and lavender trousers, to show them the motions, and line after line the strength and limberness of the limbs of the corps de ballet are tested. From the premiere who sits with sealskin sack over her stage costume with her pet dog by her side down to the latest acquisition to the maitre's (the ballet master's) corps, all must be on hand to rehearse with or without music. In the latter instance the steps are slowly but carefully gone through. Not only is there a day rehearsal, but there is private individual rehearsal of the steps at night previous to going on the stage; for there is much grace in a corps de ballet, and no girl in love with her art wishes to be considered awkward or in the rear; hence the emulation that exists, and the private rehearsals in the dressing-room. Many of these ballet dancers live poor lives, getting salaries which after buying their stage dresses leaves them little for the cupboard and very little to waste upon street costumes. Some are frail, and have admirers whose purse-strings they pull wide open, and are therefore able to rustle around in silks and sport rich golden and jewelled ornaments, while the honest girls must sup at home on crusts and share the opprobrium their shamless companions bring on the entire class. Ballet girls everywhere have a throng of giddy, dissipating male followers, and those who resist the temptations thrown in their way are deserving praise rather than condemnation.