In another week the principals join the company on the stage, and are told their places, while all principals read from their parts at first, such being the etiquette even if they know their lines. Books are soon discarded, however, and rehearsals grow rapidly longer, while everything shows signs of active progress towards production. Scenery and properties begin to be on view, and every one is sent to be measured for costumes, wigs, and boots. Then comes the first orchestral rehearsal, and finally, a week before the production, night rehearsals start in addition to day, so that people positively live in the theatre from 11.30 in the morning till 11.30 at night or later. Apart from all the general rehearsals there are extra rehearsals before or after these, for the dances.
There are generally two or three semi-dress rehearsals, followed by the full-dress rehearsal on Friday afternoon at two o’clock, or sometimes seven in the evening, when all the reserved seats are filled with friends of the management or company, various professionals connected in any way with the stage, and a number of artists and journalists, making sketches for the papers. At the end of each act the curtain is rung up and flash-light photographs taken of the effective situation and the finale, and so at last the curtain rises on the first night. Nine weeks’ rehearsal were given for a comic opera lately, and no one was paid for his or her services during all that time. It only ran for six weeks, when the salaries ceased.
In comic opera there are such constant changes, of dialogue, songs, and alterations, that the company have a general rehearsal at least once a fortnight on the average, right through the run of a piece, and there is always an entire understudying company ready to go on at any moment.
CHAPTER XVII
A GIRL IN THE PROVINCES
Why Women go on the Stage—How to prevent it—Miss Florence St. John—Provincial Company—Theatrical Basket—A Fit-up Tour—A Theatre Tour—Répertoire Tour—Strange Landladies—Bills—The Longed-for Joint—Second-hand Clothes—Buying a Part—Why Men Deteriorate—Oceans of Tea—E. S. Willard—Why he Prefers America—A Hunt for Rooms—A Kindly Clergyman—A Drunken Landlady—How the Dog Saved an Awkward Predicament.
IT is continually being asked: Why do women crowd the stage?
The answer is a simple one—because men fail to provide for them. If every man, willing and able to maintain a wife, married, there would still be over a million women left. Many women besides these “superfluous” ones will never marry—many husbands will die, and leave their widows penniless, and therefore several millions of women in Great Britain must work to live. Their parents bring them into the world, but they do not always give them the means of livelihood.
Marriage with love is entering a heaven with one’s eyes shut, but marriage without love is entering hell with them open.