“How many artists, sir?”
“Oh, counting the entire company and staff, somewhere between sixty and seventy, I suppose. Fifty of them have already arrived here in the ‘City of Rome.’”
“In what order do you produce your pieces here?”
“‘The Bells,’ ‘Charles,’ ‘The Lyons Mail,’ ‘The Merchant of Venice,’ we do first.”
“Have you any particular reason for the sequence of them?”
“My idea is to produce my Lyceum successes in their order, as they were done in London; I thought it would be interesting to show the series one after the other in that way.”
“When do you play ‘Hamlet?’”
“On my return to New York in the spring.”
“Any special reason for that?”
“A managerial one. We propose to keep one or two novelties for our second visit. Probably we shall reserve ‘Much Ado’ as well as ‘Hamlet.’ Moreover, a month is too short a time for us to get through our repertoire.”