Word: staging
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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That life on the stage was a tremendously amusing thing was the very vivid impression left by Miss Alice MacKenzie, star of "The Chocolate Soldier" when interviewed yesterday. "Of course", she said, "there is a lot of work connected with acting, especially when you play before an audience that sits and stares like so many wooden Indians as they do in Philadelphia. But just the same it is fun because it is a sort of game. There is always something different, just like the other night when I missed my one and forgot to come on the stage. Poor Charlie...
...hard part is to be spontaneous about the same jokes every night. These giggles of suppressed mirth at the end of twenty weeks of suppression get to be sort of hard. But why be lachrymose, to make an ostentatious display of my brief college career. But speaking of stage conversations some one asked me the other day just what it was that chorus girls talked about while standing about on the stage between dances. He seemed to think it would be more or less a discussion of something far removed from stage life while as a matter of fact...
...your questions about stage door Johnnies, I am sorry to say they are defunct as far as I know. They were amusing in their day so I have heard, but they are hard to find now. I don't know whether the die-hards would have me blame this on the talkies too, but whatever it was, it has carried off one of the most amusing sides of stage life. They did take themselves so seriously," and here Miss MacKenzie illuminated her remark with a grimace that was serious to beyond the hopes of the most accomplished of the gentlemen...
Just before leaving she said, "I am sorry that you had to climb so many steps to get here, but when I was Cleopatra in 'The House Boat on the Styx' I had a room below the stage and just before I was supposed to go on I was covered with a shower of dust from above so that you couldn't tell whether I was very badly tanned from my ride in the barge or just plain Topsy." Her final remark was in Italian, or perhaps it was Spanish. But she said it in such a disarming tone...
...cast are not so good. Vera Allen as Lady Anne did well in an exceedingly difficult part, but most of the others were nothing more than satisfactory. In spite of the exceptional amount of cutting in her part that was necessary to make the play fit into the modern stage time limits, she was able to convey something of an actual character to the part she played. She was won over by Richard not so much by her lack of insight, as by his extreme cleverness. She left the impression that she was a woman in the hands...