Show jumping

“ You are in two, three or four shows a day in your short time, and learning how to get over better at every show. The vaudeville audience knows what's what. You can't fool them. You've got to do your best for them all the time—and you will, or you will not remain in vaudeville, where you have to "make good" every performance. It is an invaluable experience, your first stage years, and you will gather lasting benefit from your active vaudeville appearances. ”

“ Bang went the young cannons in the rear. The stage shook, and the theatre seemed ready to fall about our ears; the females shrieked; the "supers" rushed on and shouted; then came the leaping flames from below and from the sides, until, finally, the whole picture was one burning glow and whirl of smoke, and the curtain came down in time, I suppose, to prevent a panic, for women shrieked, and men got up from their seats to flee from the theatre. Act three brought the grandest illusion of all—the great raft scene. ”

“ The air is full of burning serpents, and the water is alive with incandescent [366] figures. The grand finale is an aërial burst of rockets, as shown in our engraving.
Having seen one of these spectacles the reader will ask how the remarkable effects are obtained. Our illustrations show the scenery as viewed from the rear of the stage. The scenery is hinged and braced, some parts turning on pivots, and all arranged so as to be quickly thrown down into such semblance of ruin as shall best carry out the idea the piece is intended to represent. ”

“ If the whole show is there where there is glass, if the light is where there is ground and enough water to keep all feet chilly, if the disturbance is from laughing, and the welcome is when boards are put up to finish something then certainly the whole experience is in the haste and there is no time to use, there is no such order. ”

“ Where there is no change of situation, the scenery is the same; and where this is the case, it is no object either of attraction or expense. Little more is required than a drop-scene. Therefore, all you have to do is to get good plays, and a good company to perform them: three or four hundred people in the house will maintain a dozen or a score of comedians on the stage; and the excellence of the performance and the taste of the town keep pace with one another, and with the absence of show and extrinsic decoration. ”

“ The great unchangeable features of a show, the gymnastic, acrobatic and equestrian work, are the same now that it was a half century ago. Still with all its want of novelty it is attractive, as are all shows, and grown people have been known to share the enthusiasm of the little ones in playing circus after witnessing a performance and while the sawdust fever was still on them. ”

“ When arrived at the show place, unlike the audience collected to witness any spectacle of human invention, the multitude, with their eyes all bent one way, stood immoveable, and silent as death, till the tumult ceased, and the mighty commotion was passed by ”

“ “At first, this Earth, a stage so gloomed with woe You almost sicken at the shifting of the scenes. And yet be patient. Our Playwright may show In some fifth act what this Wild Drama means.” ”

“ On one side the variety-show intersects the ring of the circus and the curving line of the First Part of negro-minstrelsy, while on the other it impinges on the sphere of the more literary drama. Its existence is evidence that the show business is always the show business, no matter how manifold and dissimilar its manifestations may seem to be. ”

“ Such a curtain the makers of stage scenery imitate when they wish to let the audience see through the veil into fairyland and through it we see all beautiful things become more dainty and we know in our hearts that all wonder-tales are true, so long as we see them made real through the magic of this illusory veil. So through this floating, fairy film of snowflakes it is easy to see gnomes and sprites dancing and all the people of northland legends grow and vanish. ”

“ They put on their dresses and masks, and rig up something to resemble a town on the stage with hangings, and then so associate the bare scene with their life-like imitation of action that they are a marvel to the spectators—both the actors themselves of the incidents of the play, and the hangings, or rather their imaginary city. ”

“ The quick marchlike rhythm of the drama of the reel favors this artificial overdoing, too. The rapid alternation of the scenes often seems to demand a jumping from one emotional climax to another, or rather the appearance of such extreme expressions where the content of the play hardly suggests such heights and depths of emotion. The soft lights are lost and the mental eye becomes adjusted to glaring flashes. ”

“ The motion picture is the renascence of pantomime.
When Colley Cibber looked through his jeweled quizzing glass at a strange dumb-show drama newly [Pg 123] brought to England from merry France, a representation of the legend of Venus and Mars, he said that it was "form'd into a connected presentation of Dances in Character, wherein the Passions were so happily expressed, and the whole Story so intelligibly told, by a mute Narration of Gesture only, that even thinking Spectators allow'd it both a pleasing and rational Entertainment." ”

“ It is the statement of the keepers of the dives themselves.
A visit to almost any of the dives of the Twenty-second street district will convince even the most skeptical reader of the truth of this statement.
Enter and inquire for a show girl.
True, she will not be the sprightly, supple and pretty creature one sees nightly on the stages of the better theaters of the city. Yet she is a show girl—or, rather, I might say, has been one.
She is a show girl who has fallen. The sparkle of wine, the glare of lights and the happy-go-lucky company of the after-theater parties have proven her downfall. ”

“ Although called "Jumpers," they only jump in a minority of the experiments, the word jumping really including all such phenomena as lifting the shoulders, raising the hands, striking, throwing, crying, and tumbling. Jumpers have been known to fall head over heels over an embankment on which they were sitting, on suddenly hearing the whistle of a locomotive ”

“ Because, instead of appearing on a sumptuously appointed stage, I appeared in an open-air theatre; because, instead of spending my time declaiming specious moral apothegms on the stage of society and playing heroic rôles, I amused myself by performing feats of strength and risking my life on a tight-rope, in order to give full play to the strength of my muscles. And even that comparison amounts to nothing: the tight-rope dancer has his vanity as well as the tragedian or the philanthropic orator. The gambler has none; he is neither admired nor applauded nor envied. ”

“ Consider the devices whereby the stage actor holds the audience as he goes out at the side and back. He sighs, gestures, howls, and strides. With what studious preparation he ripens his quietness, if he goes out that way. In the new contraption, the moving picture, the hero or villain in exit strides past the nose of the camera, growing much bigger than a human being, marching toward us as though he would step on our heads, disappearing when largest. There is an explosive power about the mildest motion picture exit, be the actor skilful or the reverse. ”

“ They are being taught the value of their own imaginations, the useful function of accepted conventions, and the proper meaning of illusion on the stage.
Material realism on the stage is not only dull, it is deadly; the drama dies at its touch. The limitations of reality on the stage are absurdly narrow; the great central facts of life become impossible of presentation. Nothing is left to the spectator; he is inert, a cypher, a senseless block.
All great drama owes its vitality to the fact that its spectator is not a mere passive block, but the living inspiration of the whole play. ”

“ Dry-mouthed, they speak little. The least nervous, while affecting to smile, have in their eyes and voice the hesitation that marks an absent mind—that apprehension of the battle behind the foot-lights which is ever one of the most powerful attractions of the comedian’s art, its piquancy, its freshness.
The stage is encumbered by the passage to and fro of machinists and scene-builders hastening about, running into one another in the dim, pallid light falling from above, which will give place directly, as soon as the curtain rises, to the dazzling of the foot-lights. ”

“ In a certain sense, we are all Jumpers; under sudden excitement, as of a blow, or a violent, unexpected sound, any person, even not very nervous, may jump and cry, somewhat as these Jumpers do, though not with all the manifestations of the Jumpers. Hysterical women, jumping and shrieking on slight excitement, we have all seen. ”

“ They ran over pipe-stems, the edges of sabres, wires and even hairs stretched across the stage. They turned around on the edges of large glasses, crossed bamboo ladders, dispersed into all the corners, and produced strange musical effects by the combination of their various pitches of tone. The jugglers tossed them in the air, threw them like shuttlecocks with wooden battledores, and yet they kept on spinning; they put them into their pockets, and took them out still whirling as before.
It is useless to describe the astonishing performances of the acrobats and gymnasts. ”

“ If the theatrical entertainments of the present time manifest little progress in histrionic art, there has been, at any rate, marked advance in the matter of scenic illusions and mechanical effects. The thunder of our modern stage storms may no more proceed from mustard-bowls, or from "troughs of wood with stops in them," but it is, at any rate, sufficiently formidable and uproarious, sometimes exciting, indeed, the anxiety of the audience, lest it should crash through the roof of the theatre, and visit them bodily in the pit ”

“ The stage storm still bursts upon the drama from time to time; the theatre is still visited in due course by its rainy and tempestuous season; and thunder and lightning are, as much as in Addison's time, among the favourite devices of our playwrights, "put in practice to fill the minds of an audience with terror." The terror may not be quite of the old kind, but still it does well enough. ”

“ I could not see the people for one thing—at all events, not those beyond the third row of stalls. The blaze of light surrounding one on the stage, and the dimness of the rest of the house, give the audience a shadowy and ghost-like appearance, and make it impossible to see more than a general mass of white faces. As I never noticed the “hundreds upon hundreds of glaring eyes,” they did not trouble me, and I let ‘em glare. The most withering glance in the world won’t crush a blind man. ”

“ Nowadays elaborateness of stage illusion has made spoiled children of us all. We must have a doll with real hair, or else we cannot play at being mothers. We have been pampered with mechanical toys until we have lost the art of playing without them. Where have our imaginations gone, that we must have real rain upon the stage? Shall we clamor for real snow before long, that must be kept in cold storage against the spring season? A longing for concreteness has befogged our fantasy. ”

“ The play, the characters and the audience are lost in the debris both literally and artistically. Our object in dramatic expression is to enthrall, not to paralyze. Every distraction of attention [Pg 160] from the elemental mediums of pure art is an obstacle thrown into the clear channel of receptivity. Spectacles are for the most part acts that concern themselves and not deeds that are an intrinsic part of the drama. The characters and the action step back as it were, while the precipitated spectacle usurps the stage and the attention. Unlike the circus, drama has no legitimate side-shows. ”

“ It was interesting to the Engineer to watch the gradual development of the shadows against the sky, coming slowly into view as the fairies rise to sweet, thrilling melody, from underneath the stage in the transformation scene of the last act of the pantomime and spectacular drama beloved of our youth. ”

“ This is called stage-fright, and it is never cured; it has ruined more brilliant careers than the critics have. You shake your head and appeal to your former triumphs. Don't deceive yourself; I know the machinery of the stage well, and how artificial thunder and lightning are manufactured. At every performance you gain a triumph ”

“ A wreck at (stage) sea is a truly awful sight. The thunder and lightning never leave off for an instant; the crew run round and round the mast and scream; the heroine, carrying the stage child in her arms and with her back hair down, rushes about and gets in everybody's way. The comic man alone is calm! ”

“ The attics were thus in a word our respective temples of the [Pg 254] drama—temples in which the stage, the green-room and the wardrobe, however, strike me as having consumed most of our margin. I remember, that is, up and down the street—and the association is mainly with its far westward reaches—so much more preparation than performance, so much more conversation and costume than active rehearsal, and, on the part of some of us, especially doubtless on my own, so much more eager denudation, both of body and mind, than of achieved or inspired assumption. ”

“ Stage drama takes even a step in advance of fiction literature in its approximation of realistic illusion. The characters of the play become the breathing, living, walking and talking persons conceived by the playwright and anticipated by the audience. Audiences laugh and weep, rejoice and sigh, despite themselves, wherever good stage drama is offered. ”