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BUSH STREET THEATER ---- Titus & Locke...................Lessees and Managers Frank Lawler..............................Acting Manager ---- CONTINUED SUCCESS .....OF..... THE SCOUTS, BUFFALO BILL, CAPTAIN JACK AND THE SUPERB COMPANY. ---- First Night of the great sensation, THE RED RIGHT HAND: Or, Buffalo Bill's First Scalp for Custer! ---- Saturday--First Matinee of THE RED RIGHT HAND! ---- Sunday Night- THE RED RIGHT HAND!
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BUSH-STREET THEATER.-Hon. W.F. Cody (Buffalo Bill) and Captain Jack, supported by the company of the Bush-street Theater, gave for the first time last evening the sanguinary drama The Red Right Hand. The audience was a top-heavy one, a noisy gallery slightly overbalancing a less demonstrative dress-circle. We have already paid Mr. Cody's pieces that compliment of saying that of their kind they are good; they reprsent border llife with an approximation to truth, they are full of incident, and the parts taken by himself and Captain Jack are true, manly and natural, and portray faithfully the homely, heroic fiber of two genuine frontiersmen. As such, they are well worth seeing, not alone by the gallery, which admires them merely for the blood and thunder element that runs a sensational vein through them, but by all for their pictures, sometimes overcolored, of a life that is novel to most, and before long can be seen by no one except through the medium of the drama and historic fiction. The Red Right Hand will probably be more popular than Life on the Frontier. Its plot moves quicker, its incidents are more naturally arranged and it elimaxes more startling and sensational. Mr. Cody and Mr. Crawford both appear in their true characters, and reproduce scenes in which they have participated. Mr. Bradly, Mr. Billings, and Mr. Simms do some good acting, the last playing a Chinaman to whom the wild life of the border is a startling reality. The scalping of the Yellow Hand by Buffalo Bill upon the stage is taking bit of acting for the gallery. The support is generally efficient and the scenery carefully painted.
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BUSH STREET THEATER. ---- TITUS & LOCKE..........Lessees and Managers FRANK LAWLER...........Acting Manager ---- Houses Crowded Nightly! Houses Crowded Nightly! TO SEE THE HEROES. BUFFALO BILL, BUFFALO BILL, BUFFALO BILL, CAPTAIN JACK, CAPTAIN JACK. AND THE POWERFUL COMPANY. Immense Hit of the Great Sensation. THE RED RIGHT HAND; THE RED RIGHT HAND; Or Buffalo Bill's first scalp for Custer: SUNDAY NIGHT THE RED RIGHT HAND. THE RED RIGHT HAND. ---- Scouts' Matinee Every Saturday. Scouts' Matinee Every Saturday. ---- In Preparation- SCOUTS OF THE PLAINS! ---- Seats can be secured six days in advance.
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BUSH-STREET THEATER.
The performances of Buffalo Bill and Captain Jack at the Bush-street Theater offer matter for comment rather than for criticism. Their plays and themselves are without art; they only make pretense to amuse in an humble way; if they are to be judged at all it must be by their own standards. There must, doubtless, be plays for the million as well as books for the million; the imagination that cannot grasp Scott or Thackeray can be pleased, or shall we say profited, by the gaudy fiction, with thoughts as cheap as its covers; which finds its way into the house by the area instead of the society entrance. We would not place the border play on a level with the common border fiction, and do not wish to be understood as so rating it. Nice distinctions do not hold on the stage so rigidly as in the world of literature. if we judged our plays as we do our books, we should bring the stage within very narrow limits and seriously diminish our genuine amusements. We speak in this general way not caring to particularize too minutely. Mr. Cody's second play is a little livelier than his first, fuller of movement, and more wasteful of gunpowder, and much more bloody, otherwise it would have a less sanguinary name. The characters are not, perhaps, so well drawn, but the plot is better drawn out; in other words, it is extremely tenuous. The action involves several fights with Indians, a rough-and tumble contest with a bear which nearly ends Bill's career of usefulness, and a bit of insanity and death that throws a ghastly light on the scene. Buffalo Bill and Captain Jack both do some good acting, not considered as acting merely, but as representations of real personages and of life on the frontier. the Chinaman is fairly played by Mr. Simms, whose language and action are more realistic than his looks. The Indians of the play are reasonably good imitations and the white men are average trappers, hunters and military officers, Mr. Brown as the old trapper being the best. The piece wins the hearty approval of the gallery, which has been overcrowded nightly, and is witnessed with interest by numerous intelligent people who fill the dress-circle. It will be continued till further notice.
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BUSH STREET THEATER.
Of things strictly dramatic the week has furnished little, Buffalo Bill and his play Life on the Border being almost the only exception, and that has little calling for genuine criticism. It were easier to make bricks without straw than to construct an elaborate critique from such material. The play has had the advantage of a strong cast, stronger than it has merited, though judged sui generis it can hardly be considered weak. Mr. Bradley has given a picture of a rough trapper; Mr. Barrows, a portrait of a coarse Irish rascal; Mr. Mortimer has depictured the heavy villain of the piece with as much simulation of malice as is possible to him; Mr. Simms has played a Quaker Peace Commissioner, molding his conception: on "Aminadab Sleek;" and Gertie Granville has given us an Irish girl w ith boarding-house manners and conscious city ways, that made the part piquant enough without making it at all realistic of the border. This has been the character of the support which Mr. Cody has had to depend on in transferring his identity bodily to the stage as "Buffalo Bill." The two great exemplars of frontier honesty, virtue and pluck have been himself and Captain Jack, both of whom have lived lives much like that which they endeavor to represent. Both of them by their acting give satisfaction of a certain kind. Both are free from stage artifice: they speak their lines in a manly way, and walk through their parts with a naturalness and a realism which go far toward suplying the place of art itself. The border play will probably last as long as the border fiction, that is, until there ceases to be a border, and if we are to have it we may be well satisfied to have it in so good shape as this. The play is of course too high-colored for genuine art, but in borderland truth itself is gorgeous and art does not exist. The management deserve credit for having given the piece so much pictorial elegance. The audiences have been large and always pleased, the gentle pleasure of the parquet and dress circle becoming absolute rapture in the gallery. We are to have Life on the Border for a few nights longer, after which we are promised The Red Right Hand and other pieces fruitful in carnage.