One figure, however, was revealed by each and every one of these memory
flashes,--that of Fay Templeton, whose wonderful versatility as an
entertainer, and whose pure virtuosity as an artist, both of them given
free rein in these spectacles, raised her head and shoulders above her
associates in the two casts.
In "The Man in the Moon" there was nothing else that evidenced half the
art shown in her singing of the ditty "I Want a Filipino Man." It was,
it is true, a fearfully suggestive study of elemental human passion, a
song of hot blood and crude, unblushing animalism. But it was
wonderfully well done, and the swing of its rhythmic sensuality was not
to be resisted.
Two things that Fay Templeton did in "Broadway to Tokio" I recall with
especial vividness. One was her treatment of the cake-walk, commonly a
prosaic, athletic exhibition of increasing boredom. She evolved from the
conventional prancing of the gay soubrette a dance whose appeal to the
imagination was intense, a dance into which might be read many meanings.
Her cake-walk was the embodiment of languorous grace and the acme of
sensuous charm. It breathed an atmosphere of tropical indolence. It
suggested the lazy enjoyment of the cool of the evening after a long day
of hot, fierce summer sunshine, the time when one dreams idly of fleshly
delights. It was a dance teeming with passion, passion quiescent, which
a breath would fan into a blaze.
Miss Templeton's second remarkable achievement was her imitation of
Fougere, or, better still, her impersonation of Fougere. It is
difficult to describe intelligently just the effect of Miss Templeton's
art in this specialty. It was not a photographic copy of the external
Fougere; it was rather a reproduction of the Fougere personality.
Indeed, she pictured only with indifferent fidelity the Fougere
mannerisms, but she placed before one, with almost uncanny accuracy, the
Fougere individuality and the Fougere stage appeal.
It was, in fact, acting as distinguished from mimicking. Fay Templeton
literally represented Fougere as she might a dramatist's imaginary
personage. Temperamentally, Miss Templeton does not in the remotest way
suggest Fougere. The French woman, indeed, is just what Fay Templeton is
not. She is thin, she is nervous with a champagne sparkle, and she is
perpetually and restlessly vivacious in her artificial French way. Fay
Templeton is not thin, and her personality is far away from
nervousness. Where Fougere would worry herself half to death, Fay
Templeton would insist on solid comfort and plenty of time to think,
even a chance to sleep, over the vexing problem. One pictures Fay
Templeton as passing her leisure moments in the luxurious embrace of a
thickly wadded couch piled high with the softest of pillows. Nor is hers
the champagne temperament,--rather that of rich and mellow old Madeira,
a wine of substance, of delicate aroma and of fruity flavor, which does
not immediately bubble itself into a state of insipidness.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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