Life — April 2, 1896 — page 19: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

both by author and artist. It was too bad that Mr. Coghlan himself could not have played the leading male réle. In hi ds it would, no doubt, have been made interesting, but Mr. Harrington Reynolds was only dull and intensely stagey. Mr. Arthur Forrest gave to the conventional villain an animation which was quite refreshing. Some of the inebriates in the third act might well be dispensed with, for their fun was pure drivel and only retarded the action of the piec It's really quite delightful to have from London a play which is not made up , of would-be-if-they-could epigrams aimed at one or the other of the sexes, or at their relations to each other. Mr. Coghlan’s dialogue is entirely free from the taint of the recent epidemic, and is, most of it, essential to the development of | the story. Some of the scenes are unnecessarily long, but in the main the action goes along rapidly. . . . T is axiomatic among theatrical folks that the American people like to be humbugged. Mr. P. T. Barnum originated the saying, but while he hum- bugged people he never defrauded them—they got their money's worth in some form or other. Mr. Oscar Hammerstein, owner and manager of Olympia, seems to have confounded the terms, ‘Excelsior, Jr.,” during its earlier days was more or less entertaining. It may well be doubted that it was ever worth two dollars a seat. In its later career its cast and features have been so changed and weakened that it is not worth seeing at all. The programme continues to announce acts that are not performed, and in this Lire thinks Mr. Hammerstein makes, at least, an error in judgment. The public is proverbially stupid, but it “Great Bruix! How Faint I FEEL! I Must might find him out some day. Metcalfe. HAVE OVERSLEPT MYSELF THIS SPRING.” comicbooks.com.-