Talkin’ about the “polyglot” performances of Salvini and Clara Morris, as a “farewell” to Booth’s Theatre, a knot of actors and theatrical people the other day got discussin’ the point who started the idea here in this city of polyglot performances and where the first polyglot play was performed.
Now the first manager in the city of New York–and, I think, in this country–to engineer a performance given in different languages was William Stuart, of the old Wallack’s Theatre and the Winter Garden; and he got the idea by a mere accident.
Stuart was at that time managin’ Edwin Booth, who wasn’t doin’ very well just then, and Stuart was bothered what to do to stir up a Booth boom. He and the manager of the German theatre, the Stadt Theatre, now the Windsor, were very friendly, and one night Stuart dropped in to have a look at Dawison, a German tragedian, playin’ an engagement to tolerable audiences, but of course entirely German.
Somethin’ was said comparin’ Booth and Dawison, and then in the midst of this casual talk the idea came to Stuart, like a flash, to engage the two tragedians–the German and the English–and to have ‘em both appear at the same time in some Shakespearean play.
Stuart generally takes ideas–just as he takes everythin’ else–pretty easy; but the night he got that idea of a polyglot play he didn’t go to sleep at all, but set up thinkin’ about it, and drinkin’ about it–in about equal proportions to think and drink.
The more he thought and drank the better the idea looked, and the next day he mentioned the idea to Booth. Booth was struck with the singularity of the idea; he couldn’t help confessing that it was singular, but he didn’t like it for a cent because it wasn’t all Booth. There was too much of Stuart and of Dawison about it. So he pooh-poohed the project. But meanwhile the people pooh-poohed him; he was playin’ then to not quite an average hundred dollars a night, and he began to look black and feel blue.
And meanwhile Stuart kept on painti’g what tremendous houses there would be if Booth would but agree to his idea, and offerin’ Booth big terms to play a special polyglot engagement with Dawison. Finally, usin’ the line, “my poverty but not my will consents,” Booth consented, and then Stuart rushed over to see Dawison.
He found the German tragedian much more easy to get along with than the English or the American, and soon came to terms–which principally related to the money to be paid cash down by Stuart, Dawison astonishin’ Stuart by carin’ little about the fame of the thing, but carin’ a good deal about the money.
And then Methua Schiller was engaged to support the tragedians, and in order to make the play particularly polyglot, it was arranged that she should play in English and German both, speakin’ English to Booth and German to Dawison, as her part required.
This made the performance doubly polyglot and triply interestin’, and the polyglot “Othello,” the play chosen, became town talk.
The excitement was well worked up in the newspapers, and when the time came there were tremendous houses. The Winter Garden was packed every night, and packed with money. For the first time in Stuart’s management there were no passes issued, the free list was absolutely suspended, and about five hundred men of all classes and conditions were reduced to the sad alternative of either payin’ for goin’ inside or stayin’ outside, and to do ‘em justice, most of ‘em stayed outside. They were men of principle as well as their own interests. They would rather have died than paid. After all, there is somethin’ heroic about a deadhead.
The Winter Garden was crowded, though the price of admission was tripled, seats downstairs bein’ raised from seventy-five cents and a dollar to two and three dollars a seat, and the applause was about equally divided between the two tragedians. Booth didn’t like Dawison’s share in the applause a bit, but then he solaced himself with his share of the receipts. As for Methua Schiller, she played right along, rather enjoying her double sets of cues in two languages, but then, as Stuart said one night in the green room, “two languages at once are nothin’ to a woman.”
The polyglot performances passed off admirably, before and behind the curtain. But they seemed to have been the turnin’ points in the careers of two of the three parties principally concerned in ‘em.
From the date of those polyglot performances, both Dawison and Methua Schiller began to go down hill. Dawison went mad shortly after, and the papers at the time said it was owin’ to this polyglot worry. And Methua Schiller had a good deal of trouble, and died suddenly along with her husband and children, of the cholera, not long afterwards. Of course, all this had really nothin’ to do with the polyglot plays. But actors are a very superstitious set, and the idea got abroad that polyglot performances were unlucky, for the performers at any rate, though naturally Stuart, who made money off of ‘em, held that this idea was all a mistake. By the by, Stuart, not long ago, thought of the avalin’ himself of the great friendship and admiration existin’ between the German actor, Herr Barnay, and Lester Wallack to get up a polyglot performance with these two in the cast. This would have been a novelty indeed, but the idea fell through.
Stuart and Lester Wallack always have been intimate since Stuart had the old Wallack Theatre, and kept up the intimacy still–by many little social courtesies from Wallack’s side. Lester Wallack somehow used to be two years older than Stuart, but now he is several years younger. Stuart, too, owns up to bein’ an old man, whereas Wallack still calls himself, and insists on bein’ called, too, young. Probably this is the very reason the genial comedian really keeps so young.
Talkin’ of young and old, there was Collins, the famous Irish comedian, years and years ago, who was always in such a capital state of preservation, and whom Barney Williams used to detest so–as his only successful rival.
Well, Collins was playin’ an engagement at Niblo’s one time, and didn’t do as well as he had in previous engagements, and felt a little “exercised” about it. He was sure he acted as well as ever, as he really did, and seemed to be as popular as ever with his audience, as he was, but somehow these audiences were not as large as they had been. He felt just a little piqued and bothered over that fact, but he carried his pique and bother–just as he carried his years–very jauntily.
One mornin’ he was sittin’ in the office at old Niblo’s, hummin’ a sentimental ditty of Moore’s, “There’s nothin’ half so sweet in life as love’s young dream,” and hummin’ it well, too (Collins could really “sing,” whereas Barney Williams really couldn’t, which was a big point in favor of Collins, though Williams had most fun in him) when his son, Collins, junior, who acted as Collins, senior’s, agent, yelled out, at the office door, to the treasurer (not seein’ or hearin’ his father), “Is the old man about anywhere?”
“By jabers,” cried Collins seizin’ his cane as a weapon, not as an ornament this time, stoppin his Moore suddenly and startin’ up, “I know now what’s been hurtin’ me all through this last engagement. It’s not me–it’s him, the young rascal. It’s me own son goin’ round the town and alludin’ disrespectfully and detrimentally to his own father as ‘the old man.’”
And “the old man,” who was bound to be young, “went for” the young man, who called him old, with a sharp stick.
Stuart was forcibly reminded of his gettin’ old, and of the lapse of years in general, some time ago on Broadway. As he was passin’ along he heard a voice cry, “Why, Stuart,” and lookin’ up he saw the well-known sport, Hastings (Dublin Trix), whom he had not met for years and years. The two old cronies took a bottle of wine together, and then, over more wine, Hastings referred to the great Heenan and Sayres mill–a fight which both men had witnessed–Stuart as a representative of the New York press and Hastings as a professed sport. On that memorable occasion a few men were permitted inside of the staked ring, the few embracin’ say some twenty men of more or less note, including includin’ Stuart and Hastings ‘emselves. But of all those men inside the ring that famous day, those two men, Stuart and Hastings, over their wine, were the only two still alive. All the rest–the other eighteen or so–had “passed in their checks” and “joined the silent majority.” And Stuart says he has felt an older man ever since he met Dublin Trix. But Edwin Booth still lives and thrives, havin’ the well-deserved luck of bein’ destined to a longer and brighter existence than his own splendid temple of the drama, which bankrupted him and his, and has nearly bankrupted everybody who has had anythin’ to do with it, and which will soon be wiped out as a theatre forever.
[Editor’s notes: The original Booth’s Theatre, at 23rd St. and 6th Ave., offered it’s last performance in 1883: a benefit for the theatre janitor. In 1884 the building housed McCreery’s Department Store, which lasted until 1965.]
