Just before he closed the doors of his music hall for the summer, Mr. Weber amazed his patrons by providing them with a program de luxe, each enclosed in an oiled paper envelope, and printed in four colors on heavy coated paper. To be sure, it consists of forty-two pages, including the cover, but the bill of the play is in the exact center, making it easy to find, and the advertisements are most attractively displayed and illustrated.
The thing was got up by a firm of four hustling young men, who have already thrown into a panic the older firm, causing them to announce for this new season lithographed covers done in six colors. Whether as a whole the thing will be as attractive as the Weber program remains to be seen, but, in any case, the public are to be congratulated, for as the spirit of competition has entered the field, audiences will reap the benefit.
In London you buy your program from the young woman who shows you to your seat, for whom this practical Clement Scott had no great liking. Of this young woman Mr. Scott said:
I prefer the American “usher,” with the suave but determined manner, to our haughty and flighty girls at home, who think it a condescension to show you to your seat, the whereabouts of which they are usually as ignorant of as you are yourself. In an American theater you are marshaled to your seat with military regularity. In England you are at the mercy of some Miss Tousle Head who, so far as her business is concerned, is either insolently independent or sublimely ignorant.
CRITICS BAD WEATHERCOCKS.
Last Season’s Records Proved Inability of Newspaper Writers to Show How Dramatic Winds Were Blowing.
Of what use are dramatic critics anyway? Brady’s attack on them from the stage last winter was a mere pin-prick to the humiliation they must feel as makers of public opinion in connection with “The Lion and the Mouse.” When the play was brought out in New York last fall the comments were almost universally adverse, yet the people took to the piece like ducks to water, and it looks now as if it would run the year round at the Lyceum. When it was tried in London, on the other hand, the reviews were exceedingly favorable, and yet the thing lasted barely two weeks.
Take, for example, the London Daily Telegraph, which summed up its report in these words: “To last night’s audience, let it be added, the piece made evidently a very direct and forcible appeal, the applause at the end of the third act, as on the final fall of the curtain, being of the most tumultuous and enthusiastic description.”
The Standard declared: “‘The Lion and the Mouse’ is a play to be seen—it is imperfect and crude, but it is drama, strong, intense, undeniable.”
The Tribune even went so far in its praise that it felt constrained to add: “As a sop to our national self-respect, however, we may remember that the author, Charles Klein, hails originally from this side of the Atlantic.”