AMUSEMENTS.
The Lansing was crowded last night. The audience was a sort of travesty on the usual audience, and the sons and daughters of toil greatly predominated. The maids of all work, attired in elaborate evening dresses and wearing several dozen roses in their corsages, gracefully flaunted their feather fans in the boxes usually occupied by their mistresses. The dress circle was "held down" by that miscellaneous brotherhood which haunts the gallery on less august occasions. The audience was certainly informal, feeling at liberty at any time to call out the approval or disapproval in not unmistakable terms. But they were just the kind of people who know how to enjoy themselves and who are thoroughly uncorrupted by any suspicion of taste. They don't go to the theatre often enough to be critical or to lose their enthusiasm, and the Lansing seldom holds more enjoyment than it held last night.
As to the Wilbur company itself, like a country circus it embraced—figuratively—almost everything. There was some excellent trapeze work by a husband and wife, in which the woman—like Mrs. Kendal , the English daisy—usurped all the heavy acting, while the meek little man, like the long-suffering and much enduring "Willie" allowed himself to be suspended by his toes and hung by his teeth, and jerked hither and thither in the muscular arms of his Amazonian wife. Then there was a song by a maiden in a wig of variety blond, and skirts of variety brevity. There was a guitar solo by a maid with floating locks, and some skilful ring work by a young man, whose name is unknown, and a complete dearth of programs, was one of the conventional features of last night's performance. Then there was a magic lanterns show of the old fashioned kind in which the Doges palace was alternated with "Patronize the Lincoln Sausage Factory" and the leaning tower of Pisa with the Lincoln Pants company. That finished the first round, and the second was very much like it. The company is a good variety company and sets a commendable example to other companies of its kind to stick to variety and not abandon the trapeze and tightrope for Camille or Romeo and Juliet . There are so many Camilles and Juliets who ought to be doing the iron jaw and slack wire acts.
Notes
RETURN TO TOP
