IT is customary in American theatres for the orchestra to play the
audience out as well as in.
“We will dispense with that,” said Irving to his conductor, Mr. Ball.
“It is a general habit here,” remarked the Star manager.
“Yes, I understand so,” Irving replied; “but it seems to me a difficult
matter to select the music appropriately to the piece. What sort of
music do you usually play?”
“A march.”
“Ah, well, you see our plays are so different, that a march which would
do one night would be entirely out of place the next. Have you the
score of ‘The Dead March in Saul’?”
“No,” was the conductor’s reply.
“Well, then, I think we will finish as we do in London,—with the
fall of the curtain. If we make a failure on Monday night, the most
appropriate thing you could play would be ‘The Dead March.’ As you have
no score of it we will do without the exit music.”
“And who knows,” said Irving, as we walked back to the hotel,
“whether we shall have a success or not? The wild manner in which the
speculators in tickets are going on is enough to ruin anything.[5]
They have bought up every good seat in the house, I am told, and
will only part with them at almost prohibitive prices. The play-goers
may resent their operations and keep away; if they pay ten and twenty
dollars for a seat, instead of two and a half or three, they cannot be
expected to come to the house in a contented frame of mind. The more
money they have been plundered of, the more exacting they will be in
regard to the actors; it is only natural they should. Then we have no
pit proper, and the lowest admission price to the gallery is a dollar.
I would have preferred to play to Lyceum prices; but in that case they
say I should only have been putting so much more into the pockets of
the speculators. These operators in tickets are protected by the law;
managers are obliged to sell to them, and the dealers have a right to
hawk them on the pavement at the entrance of the theatres.”
“This is a State or city law, only applying to New York. I don’t
think it exists anywhere else in the Union. It certainly does not at
Philadelphia and Boston.”
“It is an outrage on the public,” he replied. “Legitimate agencies for
the convenience of the public, with a profit of ten or twenty per cent.
to the vendor, is one thing; but exacting from the public five and
ten dollars for a two-and-a-half-dollar seat is another. After all, a
community, however rich, have only a certain amount of money to spend
on amusements. Therefore the special attractions and the speculators
get the lion’s share, and the general or regular amusements of the
place have to be content with short commons.”
“If the ‘Sun’ reporter could hear you he would congratulate himself on
having called you ‘a business-like Hamlet.’”