Word: minstreling
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...producers, whose career in the theatre went back to 1871; in Manhattan. "Uncle Dan," who first made himself useful as the 15-year-old New York Tribune copy boy who could decipher Horace Greeley's handwriting, learned about the theatre as advance agent for a minstrel show. But unlike his brilliant brother Charles (lost on the Lusitania in 1915), who organized huge nationwide theatre combines, he limited his productions to Manhattan and, after 1885, chiefly to one theatre. In the roster of his great Lyceum Theatre Stock Company (with David Belasco as stage manager) were E. H. Sothern, Julia...
...Field's Little Boy Blue and My Mother's Faith are next door to chromos, but they have an intact nostalgic tone with a true power to move. Stephen Foster's Old Folks at Home, even without the music and even thanks in part to the minstrel-show spelling, has gentle, real beauty (but only one line is about Mother). Yet that newspaper level of verse is half brother to folk poetry, and profits by its blood...
...Newest minstrel of Arthurian romance is bearded, falconry-loving T. H. White, onetime English schoolmaster. The Sword in the Stone (1938), a tale of young Arthur's education in the hands of the wizard Merlyn, was so brightly fanciful that Walt Disney purchased it to succeed Snow White, Pinocchio, etc. The Witch in the Wood (1939) was a more slapdash account of Arthur's early kingship. This week appears the best of the series: The Ill-Made Knight, a whimsical chronicle of Arthur's further attempts to found civilization by channeling Might, via the Round Table, into...
Unhappiest esthete in Japan last week was Charles Arsene-Henry, French Ambassador to Tokyo. A scholar of Japanese language and literature, voluminously informed particularly on Japanese poetry, polite as a Japanese minstrel, Ambassador Arsene-Henry falls into the first classification. Last week he was cruelly hounded by devotees of the second. In a week of bitterest tragedy for his France, it appeared that something equally ruinous might be at hand in Asia-the beginning of the end for the white man's oriental empires. The discomfort of Ambassador Arsene-Henry was pathetically symbolic...
...pitched its tent for a ten-month road tour. As familiar throughout the South as a statue of Robert E. Lee, Silas Green from New Orleans claims that this is its 51st year on the road; oldtimers can remember it for at least 38. Part revue, part musicomedy, part minstrel show, it tells, season after season, of the adventures of two Negroes, short, coal-black Silas Green and tall, tannish Lilas Bean. For years the show never bothered to change its plot. When the public finally started to yawn, Silas and Lilas found they had better vary their mishaps each...