_Dr. Gerald Sumner_ Arthur Byron. _Budd Woodbridge_ Wallace Eddinger. _Preston de Witt_ Gilbert Douglas. _Heinrich_ Richard Malchien. _Hartley_ John N. Wheeler. _Mr. Stone_ John Clements. _Virginia Xelva_ Martha Hedman. _Grace Tyler_ Ruth Shepley. _Marion Sumner_ Josephine Parks. _Gertrude Ludlow_ Dorothy Megrew. _Mrs. Creighton Woodbridge_ Ida Waterman. “SEVEN CHANCES.” “Odds life, sir! if you have the estate, you must take it with the live stock on it, as it stands!” exclaims _Sir Anthony Absolute_, in “The Rivals,” to his son, when mentioning that his proffer of “a noble independence” is “saddled with a wife.” Such arbitrary bestowal of wealth contingent on matrimony--frequent in actual experience--is one of the best established and most respected expedients of comical stage dilemmas, and it recurs, at intervals, in one form or another, with much the inevitability of death and taxes. It is the basis of another entertaining farce, called “Seven Chances,” which Belasco produced at the George M. Cohan Theatre, New York, August 8, 1916, and which also enjoyed a long and prosperous career. That farce was built on a “suggestion” derived from a short story by Mr. Gouverneur Morris, entitled “The Cradle Snatcher,” and, originally, it was called “Shannon’s Millions.” It was several times rebuilt, under Belasco’s supervision,--Mr. Roi Cooper Megrue being the last of his coadjutory playwrights. It was produced, April 17, 1916, at the Apollo Theatre, Atlantic City, New Jersey, under the name of “The Lucky Fellow.” Its comical incidents revolve around _Jimmy Shannon_, an amiable young bachelor with a vigorous antipathy to matrimony, whose sardonic grandsire, dying, leaves to him by will a fortune of twelve million dollars, conditional upon his being married by the time that he is thirty years old. _Shannon_ is informed of that contingent bequest on the eve of his attainment of the specified age. He is at a Country Club where, also, there are seven young women. “The affair cries haste and speed must answer it.” The impecunious _Shannon_ will propose marriage to each one of those females, if necessary: thus he has “seven chances” of obtaining the impendent fortune,--which, at last, he gets, along with a bride so young and beauteous as to reconcile him to the imposed change in his state. The opportunities for fun in all this are obvious; critically to dilate upon them would be much like breaking a butterfly on the wheel. They were utilized to the full under Belasco’s direction by a good company,--the parts being cast as follows: