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With the stage-director standing thus, for benefit or hindrance, between the author and the audience, how is the public to appreciate what the dramatist himself has, or has not, done? An occasion is remembered in theatric circles when, at the tensest moment in the first-night presentation of a play, the leading actress, entering down a stairway, tripped and fell sprawling.
These are placed in the hands of a "producer," corresponding to a stage-director, generally an actor or theatrical man of experience, with a highly developed dramatic instinct. The various actors are selected, parts are assigned, and the scene-painters are set to work on the production of the desired scenery.
Her voice got better, got worse. Her acting remained mediocre to bad. At the fifth rehearsal after the break with the stage-director, Mildred saw Crossley seated far back in the dusk of the empty theater. It was his first appearance at rehearsals since the middle of the first week.
The curtain fell, and while the applause rose and died down and rose again, and the people called for "Jane West! Jane West!" the stage-director, a plump little Jew, came out behind the footlights and held up his hand. There was a gradual silence.
I sat back in my chair and waited for him to bob up. He bobbed up about five minutes later. Things had got a bit stormy by that time. The Voice and the stage-director had had another of their love-feasts this time something to do with why Bill's "blues" weren't on the job or something.
"I'll find," bellowed Mr Goble at his vanishing back, "a chorus-man who'll play it a damned sight better than you!" He waved to the assistant stage-director. "Send the chorus-men on the stage!" "All the gentlemen of the chorus on the stage, please!" shrilled the assistant stage-director, bounding into the wings like a retriever. "Mr Goble wants all the chorus-gentlemen on the stage!"
He drew a green-covered script from his pocket and handed it with an air to the pallid assistant stage-director. Then, more gracefully than ever Freddie Rooke had managed to move downstage under the tuition of Johnson Miller, he moved upstage to the exit. "I trust that you will be able to find someone who will play the part according to your ideas!"
But hist! whom have we here? Tell me, do you see the same thing I see?" Like the vanguard of a defeated army, Mr Saltzburg was coming dejectedly across the stage. "Well?" said the stage-director. "They would not listen to me," said Mr Saltzburg brokenly. "The more I talked, the more they did not listen!" He winced at a painful memory.
Mr Goble jerked his head so violently that the Derby hat flew off, to be picked up, dusted, and restored by the stage-director. "Oh, so you don't like it? Well, you know what you can do . . ." "Yes," said Jill, "we do. We are going to strike." "What!" "If you don't let Mae go on, we shan't go on. There won't be a performance tonight, unless you like to give one without a chorus." "Are you crazy!"
And one of our objects was to take some pictures of the castle, as well as spy around a bit." The red-faced stage-director laughed even as he kept on mopping his forehead. Evidently it mattered little to him that the air was quite chilly, for his duties kept him so much on the jump he was sweltering from the perspiration of hard, honest labor. "Say you so, my young friend?" he exclaimed.
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