Lyceum Theatre

“ With all its dignity, the University gave me the horrors as a building. I am glad that I had nothing to learn in it. One cannot imagine such a narrow compass for a school, even though, as the student of a German university, one may have suffered a great deal on the benches of the auditorium. The anatomical theatre is a perfect model of the art of pressing students together. The audience are piled one above another in a tall, pointed funnel. They look down upon the narrow space where the table stands ”

“ On the whole, the performance reflected much credit on the Dramatic Society; indeed, its excellence was such that I am led to hope that the University will some day have a theatre of its own, and that proficiency in scene-painting will be regarded as a necessary qualification for the Slade Professorship. On the stage, literature returns to life and archæology becomes art. A fine theatre is a temple where all the muses may meet, a second Parnassus, and the dramatic spirit, though she has long tarried at Cambridge, seems now to be migrating to Oxford. ”

“ I picked up a programme the other day, belonging to what was once a first-class house, and is so still in all except the standard of the performance, and found such old and worn-out features as a lightning crayon artist and a lightning change artist, both of which are so threadbare that even a ten-cent theatre wouldn't care to give them stage room. ”

“ The pink and blue ribbon, which has replaced the square gold watch-key of other days, fluttered at every button-hole, and with pealing music leading the way, the long, long procession--a Phi Beta Kappa procession such as perhaps Harvard never saw before--wound under the imposing buildings towards the beautiful college hall, the Sanders Theatre.
A great college day is always a feast of memory. As the music swelled and the procession moved, the air was full of visions of forms long vanished, of voices forever silent. ”

“ Shakespeare said, "All the world's a stage." If this is true, do we not owe the stage the same courtesy, respect and honor that we owe the world of fellow-men? Be as well-mannered and courteous at the theater and opera as you would in the most fastidious drawing-room. ”

“ It sometimes happens that at a première in London the least enjoyable part of the performance is the play. I have seen many audiences more interesting than the actors, and have often heard better dialogue in the foyer than I have on the stage. At the Lyceum, however, this is rarely the case, and when the play is a play of Shakespeare’s, and among its exponents are Mr. Irving and Miss Ellen Terry, we turn from the gods in the gallery and from the goddesses in the stalls, to enjoy the charm of the production, and to take delight in the art. ”

“ The auditorium was tastefully decorated and would hold about three hundred people.
“Well, monsieur! what do you say to our theatre?”
“That it would put many provincial theatres to shame.”
“And we flatter ourselves, too, that we give better performances than one sees in the provinces. We do not shrink from anything: comedy, vaudeville, opéra-comique! We play everything except tragedy.” ”

“ The brilliantly colored, fantastically clothed girls leaning against the bare brick wall of the theatre, or whispering together in circles, with their arms close about one another, or reading apart and solitary, or working at some piece of fancy-work as soberly as though they were in a rocking-chair in their own flat, and not leaning against a scene brace, with the glare of the stage and the applause of the house just behind them. ”

“ The crowning advantage of a theatre to a nervous and hard-wrought lecturer is its seclusion. You get in and out by the stage door, and there is not one person in a hundred of your audience could find that door, and if he did he would not get admittance. From the floor to the stage there is no way, and when you pass behind the curtain you are beyond reach even of an interviewer. ”

“ Why shouldn't there be a School for Critics? The Master would take his pupils to the Theatre regularly, and could lecture on the Play as it proceeded. Should Managers and Actors be so blind to the best interests of their Art as to refuse to allow the play to be stopped from time to time to allow of the Instructor's remarks, then he would have to wait until after each Act, and retire with his pupils into some quiet corner of the Refreshment-room, where he could give his lecture. ”

“ We have some twenty or thirty theatres in London without one school of acting; which is possibly a mistake. But it is not such a bad mistake as to have four large music schools without one lyrical theatre. Nothing can be more preposterous. Yet there is at this moment more chance of a fifth music school being established than of an Opera-house being founded at which the shoals of composers and vocalists shot out every year would have an opportunity of pursuing their profession. ”

“ This is a theatre, in which, and before which, it has often amused me to fancy myself a man of wealth, when my first diversion would be a complete renovation—without any reconstruction or vandalism—of this playhouse, and the production of some play by Shakespeare, for to me, no other theatre in New York, unless it be the Academy of Music, lends itself so readily to a production of Shakespeare as the Thalia. ”

“ The great bulk of dramatic entertainment is uplifting in its tendencies. The infinite variety of plays presented, showing human life in all conditions, and under every variety of circumstances, can not be otherwise than educational in effect upon those who witness them. However crude or devoid of literary merit a play may be, there seldom is one, however bald in plot or uninteresting in sentiment, but what "points a moral and adorns a tale."
In Shakespeare's day the theatre was even more or an educational institution than it is today. ”

“ I may, perhaps, be allowed to congratulate you on the excellent theatre which you now possess—I do not mean the Sheldonian—and at the same time to express a hope that, as a more liberal, and might I say a wiser, régime allows the members of the University to go to the play, they will not receive any greater moral injury, or be distracted any more from their studies, than when they were only allowed the occasional relaxation of hearing comic songs. Macready once said that "a theatre ought to be a place of recreation for the sober-minded and intelligent." ”

“ The theatre is the coolest place I have yet been in, I mean at rehearsal; when the front is empty, and the doors open, and the stage is so dark that we are obliged to rehearse by candlelight. That washed-out man, who failed in London when he acted Romeo with me, is to be my Fazio ”

“ I think that the new school is right in wishing to free the English theatre from foreign influences, and in its efforts to give the drama a moral value and an ideal. But I think the old school is not far wrong when it defends, to a certain extent, the more popular forms of dramatic art, and when it would have the drama follow the indications of success, and not isolate itself from that public of whose feelings it should be the living expression. ”

“ And whereas, in the case of the other arts, the student may consider the painter and ignore the picture-dealer, or analyse the mind of the novelist without analysing that of his publisher, the student of the drama in any age must always take account of the manager, and cannot avoid consideration of the economic organisation of the theatre in that age. ”

“ Quite young people, people ranging between the ages of four and five, who have seen but one or two pantomimes, still seem to have the glamour of the theatre full on them. But adolescents, and people in the prime of life, do merely, for the most part, grumble about the quality of the plays. Yet the plays of our time are somewhat better than the plays that were written for our elders. Certainly the glamour of the theatre has waned. And so much the better for the drama's future. ”

“ And many pronounced patrons of the dramatic art even maintain that such exhibitions are indispensable to the proper development of a dramatic education, and that when the necessities of the parents require it, charity should encourage the children to procure this means of obtaining a livelihood. But let us examine the other side of the question. When the curtain rises in the theatre, a draught of warm air rushes from the audience on to the stage, and often paralyzes for some moments the vocal chords of the actors. ”

“ With such an arrangement of the stage, the piece itself, the actors' mode of playing, in a word, everything was to coincide; and thus an entirely new theatre was to arise.
The French actors had, in comedy, attained the summit of the true in art. Their residence at Paris, their observations of the externals of the court, the connexion of the actors and actresses with the highest classes, by means of love affairs—all contributed to transplant to the stage the greatest realness and seemliness of social life; and on this point the friends of nature found but little to blame. ”

“ In our class instruction in this line of work only the "straight" makeup for youth is presented, that being the one our young lady pupils find especially adapted to their stage needs. These special classes are held as occasion requires to meet the students' demands, and are given in our own Demi-Tasse Theatre, connected with the studios. Usually a demonstration is made with a blonde, a brunette and a red-head, to show the class the different requirements of the different types. ”

“ The school for actors has not yet come into being, but at the annual festivals, when Shakespearean companies take the boards in the theatre which forms a prominent part of the Memorial, you may witness quaint new readings of the dramatist’s intentions.
The great pile of buildings standing by the beautiful Bancroft gardens, in fine grounds of its own beside the river, “comprises,” as auctioneers and house agents might say, the theatre aforesaid, a library, and picture gallery. ”

“ And the more extensive, democratic Community Drama movement is making play-actors and theatre-workers of thousands who have heretofore been auditors. There will always be a professional group of artists of the theatre, but in their theatres there will be a close understanding and perhaps a physical connection between the audience and the stage; in the great, popular theatre it is conceivable that there will be very little distinction between the auditorium and the stage. ”

“ There is no doubt but that these two schools have unique facilities for developing an interest in the acted drama. But artistic results have often been secured in the school theatre with equipment falling far short of the ideal standards achieved at Montclair and at Scarborough. Other less fortunate schools are, moreover, at no particular disadvantage when it comes to the class-room study of the drama for which this book is primarily planned, this work being the first step in the direction of a more intelligent attitude toward modern plays and modern theatres. ”

“ This Evening to the Royal Institution, to hear Professor Owen, the Hunterian Professor to Surgeons' College, Lecturer on Comparative Anatomy and Physiology, on the Nature of Limbs. To the Institution early, to the Theatre, and there got a good Place, the Theatre already filling and soon crammed like any Playhouse where some leading Actor make his appearance in a great Part, Gallery and all, as they say, to the Ceiling. The Audience sitting on semi-circular Benches covered with red Stuff, Tier above Tier, behind the select Visitors to the Front in reserved Chairs. ”

“ They entered the auditorium and stood for a moment looking about the theatre. People were passing quickly into their seats now, and the theatre was full of an eager air, of massed pleasure, and a loud buzz of conversation spread over the stalls from the pit where rows of young women whispered to each other excitedly as this well-known person and that well-known person entered. ”

“ These latter were to leave me, however, with a fonder vision still than that of the comparatively jejune "lecture-room" version; for the first exhibition of them to spring to the front was the fine free rendering achieved at a playhouse till then ignored by fashion and culture, the National Theatre, deep down on the East side, whence echoes had come faintest to ears polite, but where a sincerity vivid though rude was now supposed to reward the curious. ”

“ By the side of the rum curse flourishes, as our author points out, the low theatres and concert halls, but he wisely observes that these places must not be confounded with the first-class and reputable houses, whose managers are ceaselessly striving to entertain and elevate their patrons. Music may be made one of the most inspiring and ennobling agencies, while the theatre holds a power for the education and elevation of the masses possessed by few other popular agencies, for it appeals simultaneously to the eye, the ear, and the heart of the people. ”

“ In order, therefore, to understand the limitations of the drama as an art, and clearly to define its scope, it is necessary to inquire into the psychology of theatre audiences. This subject presents two phases to the student. First, a theatre audience exhibits certain psychological traits that are common to all crowds, of whatever kind,—a political convention, the spectators at a ball-game, or a church congregation, for example. ”

“ A person reads a book to himself or to a small group. In most cases, he may choose the conditions under which he will read it, indoors or out, alone or with people about him, etc. In the theatre, according to the size of the auditorium, from one hundred to two thousand people watch the play, and under given conditions of light, heat, and ventilation. They are at a distance, in most cases, 8 from the stage. It is shut off from them more than once in the performance by the fall of the curtain. The novel appeals to the mind and the emotions through the eye. The stage appeals to both eye and ear. ”