The music is excellent. The performance lasts from seven
till twelve, five hours, and includes three pieces. The first is a
farce, in which the orthodox stage papa looks over the top of a screen
in a fury at the orthodox stage-lovers, and ends the piece by joining
their hands with the orthodox "Take her, you young rascal!" The second
piece is a nautical, black-eyed-Susan sort of drama, with the genteel
young navy lieutenant who sings like a siren; the jolly old tar who
swaggers like a ship in the trough of the sea; the comic servant who
is in love with the heroine, and whose passion brings him droll
burdens of woe; and so on. Both these pieces are interspersed with
songs, duets, quartets, after the manner of the old-fashioned Dibdin
"Jolly Waterman" style of pieces, never seen on our stage now-a-days,
nor on the French stage except at minor theatres. Follows a
pantomime--_Monsieur Goosequill's Troubles_--the only pantomime of the
kind introduced in America by the Ravels that I have ever seen in
Paris, this style of entertainment having gone completely out of
fashion in France.
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