“The stage history of ’La Belle Russe’ is interesting. Wallack had opened his theatre with ’Money,’ which had been followed by a play by Pinero. He had met with failure all along the road, and his heart began to question whether he was right in forsaking his old ground on Thirteenth Street and in moving so far up-town. ’La Belle Russe,’ put on hurriedly, as a last forlorn hope, retrieved his fortunes. It called a spade a spade and did not show any reticence, the papers declared, and they flayed it as hard as ever they could. There was one exception, and that was Edward A. Dithmar, of ’The New York Times.’ He said it was a new era among plays, and, although he was not a prophet, he put his finger on the elements that achieved success, and this was long before the day of ’The Second Mrs. Tanqueray.’ Bronson Howard, at the height of his success, declared, in a public lecture, that it was a model of construction, and confessed that he had already seen it seventeen times, each evening discovering some new technical excellence in it. I do not want to appear boastful; the facts of the theatre are no longer personal after they have been made known to the public.”
Bronson Howard was a man of talent, though his plays conclusively show that it was not of a high order and that his command of technical resource in dramatic construction was not remarkable: he may have required seventeen inspections of the drama in order to perceive its many practical merits as an histrionic vehicle: most experienced observers could, and did, discern them at one view. Belasco’s statements with regard to Wallack, above quoted, are not correct. Wallack did not open his Thirtieth Street theatre with “Money”: he opened it, January 4, 1882, with “The School for Scandal”: “Money” was not acted at that theatre till March 23, 1888,—though a play by A. W. Pinero, entitled “The Money Spinner,” was the second acted there, January 21, 1882. Wallack had not “met with failure all along the road.” He closed his theatre at Thirteenth Street with a presentation, under the management of Samuel Colville, of the English melodrama of “The World,” which ran there from April 11 to July 2, 1881, receiving eighty-four performances, and which gained gross receipts to the extent of about $65,000 (at the time, when prices were about half what they are now, an extraordinary profit): he produced another English melodrama, called “Youth,” at his new theatre, February 20, 1882, and this play ran till May 6: “La Belle Russe” was produced by Wallack on May 8, and it ran till the close of the season, June 28. The presentment of it there was a notably handsome one and was distinctly successful. Rose Coghlan was specially excellent in her evincement of agonizing apprehension beneath a forced assumption of calm, and by the denoted prevalence of an indomitable will over mental terror. This was the cast at Wallack’s:
| Captain Dudley Brand | Osmond Tearle. |
| Sir Philip Calthorpe | Gerald Eyre. |
| Monroe Quilton, Esq. | John Gilbert. |
| Roberts | C. E. Edwin. |
| Barton | H. Holliday. |
| Beatrice (Geraldine) | Rose Coghlan. |
| Lady Elizabeth Calthorpe | Mme. Ponisi. |
| Little Beatrice | Mabel Stephenson. |
| Agnes | Celia Edgerton. |
Belasco left New York in the latter part of December, 1881, and he arrived in San Francisco on Christmas Day. “Chispa,” by Clay M. Greene and Slason Thompson, was produced at the Baldwin Theatre on December 26 and it ran there for two weeks,—in the course of which Maguire returned home; the differences between him and Belasco were composed, and the latter was presently reinstalled in his familiar place at the Baldwin. On January 16, 1882, acting Matthias, in “The Bells,” W. E. Sheridan began a season there which lasted for seven weeks, during which he revived “Richelieu,” “Othello,” “Hamlet,” and other plays of the legitimate repertory which he had previously presented in San Francisco (November-December, 1800), and also “King John” and “The Fool’s Revenge.” The last-named tragedy was brought out on March 3, the first performance of it being given for the benefit of Belasco’s old friend and teacher, Mrs. “Nelly” Holbrook.
BELASCO AND HIS “THE CURSE OF CAIN.”
Sheridan’s season terminated on March 5, and, on the 7th, occurred the first performance of a new play constructed, while that season lasted, by Belasco in collaboration with the excellent and much respected Peter Robertson (1847-1911), long dramatic critic of “The San Francisco Chronicle.” It was called “The Curse of Cain,” and its more active author has written of it as follows:
“Strange as it may appear, Cain was my hero. Abel had never appealed to me, any more than his forebears, in the garden of the bright flaming sword, whence the apple-eating Eve had been so forcibly, ejected. ’The Curse of Cain’ in embryo was a simple trifle of an allegory, which afterwards developed into a four-act drama with prologue and epilogue. And now that I look back upon it I think it was somewhat remarkable for strange innovations to the stage of that day. For the first time realistic thunderstorms and lightning effects were introduced, more naturally than anything that had gone before. I do not wish to pooh-pooh modern inventions, double stages, and all the paraphernalia of the latter-day drama, but I do contend that we could not have been outdone.”
It will not, I think, appear “strange” to most persons that to Belasco, as a dramatist, the character of Cain should be more attractive than that of Abel. It is, I know, sometimes asserted that evil is merely the absence of good and a passive state. But that assertion is untrue. Why evil should exist at all is a mystery. But that it does exist and that, existing, it is a positive, active force which supplies the propulsive dramatic movement of most great representative plays,—of “Othello,” “Hamlet,” “King Richard III.,” and “Macbeth,” for example,—is obvious. Many of the great poets have felt this and exhibited it in their poetry. Mephistopheles is the dominant figure and the animating impulse of Goethe’s “Faust” and of Bailey’s “Festus,” and that is true, likewise, of Satan, in Milton’s “Paradise Lost.” Cain is the exponent of evil in the Bible narrative, the active, dramatic figure—and Cain, not Abel, accordingly engaged the attention of Byron, in one of his greatest poems, and of Coleridge, in a fragment on the same subject. Belasco’s declared preference, as a dramatist, seems to me to be an inevitable one. There is not, however, much relevancy in the expression of it as regards his play of “The Curse of Cain.” That fabric does not relate to the Bible narrative: it is a melodrama, of the period in which it was written, which tells, in an artificial but momentarily effective and diverting manner, a conventional tale of good and evil in conflict,—of crime long unpunished and honor much abused; of prosperous villainy and persecuted innocence borne down under a false accusation of murder; of harsh suffering in gypsy camps and prison cells, and, finally, of the vindication of virtue and retributive justice overtaking the transgressor. It was avowedly fashioned on the model of such earlier plays as “The World” (which Belasco had successfully set upon the stage fourteen months before), “The Lights o’ London,” “Mankind” and “Youth,” and it was devised for the purpose of making lavish scenic display and startling theatrical effects, in the hope of winning back public support for the Baldwin. That purpose though not that hope was fulfilled, all contemporary commentators, in effect, agreeing with the published declaration that “never before in San Francisco has there been such a liberal and beautiful display of scenery as that provided for this play.” “The Curse of Cain” was divided into seven acts, all of which were richly framed, and four of which,—Waterloo Bridge, London, during a snowstorm; a Gypsy Camp, in rural England; a Ruined Abbey, and “the Whirlpool Lighthouse,”—were affirmed “marvels of stage painting and effect.” In the scene of the Gypsy Camp Belasco indulged to the full his liking for literalism,—providing for the public edification a braying donkey, neighing horses, cackling hens, crowing cocks, quacking ducks, and a rooting, grunting pig. In the Lighthouse Scene, as one account relates, having assembled his dramatis personæ for the final curtain by the novel yet simple expedient of “washing them all up from the ocean,” after a shipwreck, like flotsam, he introduced a frantic struggle between the villain and the hero, beginning on the wave-beaten rocks, conducted up a spiral stairway within the lighthouse and intermittently visible through the windows thereof, and terminating in the fall of the villain from the pinnacle of that edifice to a watery grave,—with which fitting demise, and the union of lovers, the spectacle drew sweetly to a close. “The critics,” writes Belasco, “had plenty of fun with the absurdities of the piece (which hardly needed to be pointed out), and I had many a good laugh at it myself; but, for all that, it was the most elaborate scenic production of the kind ever made in the West, and the people who came to see it went wild over it. The only trouble was not enough of ’em could be induced to come!”
“The Curse of Cain” was acted from March 7 to 18, except on the evenings of the 8th and 15th, when Frederick Haase acted at the Baldwin. J. B. Dickson, of Brooks & Dickson, who saw the play there, purchased the right to produce it in the East, in English, and Gustav Amberg (then in San Francisco as manager of the Geistinger Opera Company) arranged to bring out a German version of it at the Thalia Theater, New York,—but I have not found that either of those managers ever presented it. A fragmentary record of the original cast, which is all that diligent research has discovered, shows Mrs. Saunders and Ada D’Aves as members of the company and signifies that the chief characters were allotted thus: