AT THE PLAY.
"PUSS IN NEW BOOTS."
Five hours is a great space out of a man's life, but that was precisely the time taken by Mr. ARTHUR COLLINS to present his Puss in New Boots, so that I had leisure to study the book of the words, sold shamelessly to the unsuspecting (of whom I was not one), and compare the rough sketches of our three standard authors of the Lane, Messrs. COLLINS, SIMS and DIX with the version, by no manner of means final, of the comedians. A pantomime book is on the whole rather a mournfully unsubtle document. The thing is frankly not meant to be read when the blood is cool. It is the Action, Action and again Action of such hefty knock-abouts as WILL EVANS, ROBERT HALE and STANLEY LUPINO that makes the dry bones live and the old squibs crackle. And it is good fun to watch the audience at their share of authorship, setting the seal of their approval upon the happy wheeze, the well-contrived business, and blue-pencilling with their silence the wash-out or the too obscure allusion.
DIANA OF THE LANE.
The show is substantially new throughout—new songs, new scenery, new japes, new acrobatics. A new Puss, too, as well as new boots; and, without any reflection on little Miss LENNIE DEANE, who was quite an adequate Puss of pantomime, we may regret Miss RENÉE MAYER.
Miss FLORENCE SMITHSON still delights the curious with her Swedish exercises in alt, and makes a very pretty lady of high degree for a pantomime marquis, who is no other than Miss MADGE TITHERADGE stepping down from the "legitimate" and bringing an air and an elocution unusual and admirable. She made her excellent speaking voice do duty in recitative for song, and the innovation is not unpleasing. If it be fair in frivolous public places to dig down to those thoughts that better lie too deep for tears, Mr. ALFRED NOYES' A Song of England, clear spoken by her with tenderness and spirit, is a better instrument than most.
Mr. HALE's Baroness challenges comparison with Mr. GEORGE GRAVES's. She is perhaps more womanly ("no ordinary" type), less grotesquely irrelevant and profane—though she does her bit. On the other hand, she is more active and less repetitive. When, the good fairy endowing her with beauty, she appeared as DORIS KEANE in Romance, that was an applauded stroke. And when she lied beneath the tree of truth and the chestnuts fell each time truth was mishandled, thickest of all when it was asserted that a certain Scotch comedian had refused his salary, this was also very well received. On the whole, then, a satisfactory Baroness.
Mr. LUPINO (the miller's second son) is really an exquisite droll, and I don't remember to have seen him in better form. He has some of the authentic ingredients of the old circus clown—a very valuable inheritance.
Mr. WILL EVANS is always good to watch, always has that air of enjoying himself immensely that is the readiest way to favour. He seemed at times to be, as it were, looking wistfully for his old pal, GRAVES; missed probably that companionable nose and those reliable da capos which give such opportunity for the manufacture of gags; whereas Mr. HALE is a "thruster." But cooking the recherché dinner in the gas cooker that becomes a tank, and putting up the blind and laying the carpet—here was the WILL EVANS that the children of all ages applaud.