29

AMUSEMENTS.

THE ADELPHI.

Here comes another drama of Far Western life, - a piece which, with all its grotesquery, retains a certain flavor of the mountains. The playright has sketched out a pathway, and has left the hardy mountaineers to follow it out, and the actors, being for the most part persons not trained in the harness of stage "business", there is a wonderful freedom from all conventionality in the stage effects produced by them. Compared with the "society drama" of the day, or the "domestic," or the "emotional," this free, rough sketch - dashed off, as it would seem, in a kind of frolie by a careless genius, who builded better than he knew - is really an addition to our dramatic literature. It is as true as the stories in the Arabian Nights. It is not as wildly improbable in incident or situation as one-half of the drawing-room dramas which pass current in these days, and it has the inmense advantage of dealing with unfamiliar occurrences. The terrible Mountain Meadows butchery - recently made fresh in all minds by the tardy retribution visited upon the head of John D. Lee - has an attraction for the dime novelist, and the writer of plays. The subject has never been handled by a competent artist, and so it has been left for artizans to deal with. Maj. Burt has produced a rough-and-tumble picture to suit a certain class, and he has handled the subject in a roughshod way that produces better effects than the most patient polishing could have accomplished. He has the advantage of having coadjutors like Buffalo Bill, and real red men, who have passed through the scenes they struggle to mimic, and thus the drama acquires, in their handling of it, a certain air of reality which is wanting in the older specimens of this kind of workmanship. Mr. Cody is the hero of the piece, and to any one familiar with Mr. Cody's personal history it requires no stretch of the imagination to realize the incidents in which he is presented as the central figure. 'Tis like being a boy again, and reading one of Fenimore Cooper's tales. Here is a real Hawkeye, and, to you, here is the veritable Chingachgook. The age of romance is not ended after all. Mr. Vicent Crummies would have pawned his immortal soul for such a set of properties, so far ahead of real pumps and tubs.

The scenes in the drama are admirably painted by Frank Skiff, the scenic artist whose acquaintence with the localities described has lent a vigor and freshness to his brush. And Bill himself is a noble specimen of Western humanity tall, musuclar, and handsome, the very ideal of a border hero. He acts remarkably well for a man whose life has been passed more among the realities than the simulations of savage life, and there is a freshness both in his walk and conversation which, it is to be hoped, he will