Theatrical and Circus Life: or, Secrets of the Stage, Green-Room and Sawdust ArenaJennings, John J. (John Joseph)
History
Theatrical and Circus Life: or, Secrets of the Stage, Green-Room and Sawdust Arena
Jennings, John J. (John Joseph)
Circus; Theater -- United States
The managers, too, share this weakness of their actors. None of them
would change their ticket-boxes for fear of a change of luck. When they
move they take their ticket-boxes with them. Wallack has the same boxes
that were used at the doors of his father's theatre years ago, and
Daly has those which received the pasteboards during his first season
of success. When Tony Pastor removed from the Bowery to Broadway he
took his boxes over there, and has them with him now in his tour over
the country. With all our modern innovations and realism, we have not
made any inroads on the folk-lore of the drama. The theatre is still
fairy-land, and its creatures, though not fairies themselves, commune
with them closely.
Actors like many other people have a perfect horror of the number
thirteen. The only man in the profession who openly defies the
superstition attaching to this number is John R. Rogers, the manager
of the "My Sweetheart" Company, of which Minnie Palmer and Robert E.
Graham are the star features. Rogers, it is said, not only got together
a company of thirteen people, in which the thirteen letters of Mr.
Graham's name stood out in uninviting prominence; but he began his
season on Friday, the 13th of the month, and in other ways wooed a dire
and speedy fate for himself and his people; but good luck appears to
have attended him, and he is still defiant as ever of the terror-laden
and ominous number. In contradistinction to Mr. Roger's success, the
failure of another combination may be given. Frank L. Gardner, who has
thirteen letters in his name, brought out the play "Legion of Honor,"
whose title is composed of exactly thirteen letters, and had Samuel
W. Piercy,--who died last winter in Boston, while supporting Edwin
Booth in his tour,--for leading man, and by doing so freighted down
his enterprise with another ill-starred feature, for Mr. Piercy's name
contained thirteen letters. The play failed, and the superstitious
people of the profession immediately attributed the failure to the
presence of too many baker's dozens in the organization. A certain
well-known prima donna whose engagement was to begin on the 13th of
the month went to the impresario and begged to have the date changed;
she said she knew she would have no luck if she began to sing on the
date provided for her; besides that her friends had persuaded her that
fortune would only frown upon her if she made her first appearance on
the 13th. The 12th was Friday, another day fraught with frightful evil
to the singing and acting fraternity, so rather than make an unlucky
beginning, the prima donna opened on the 11th, and sang two nights for
nothing, although two nights' warbling under her contract meant an
amount of money that would make a poor man's head swim.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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