Innovation at Weber’s May Result in the Disappearance of Smudgy Blanket
Sheets in Other Playhouses.
When the late Clement Scott, the well-known English dramatic critic,
visited this country in 1900, he wrote his impressions of American
theaters for the London _Sketch_ and devoted his second paragraph to the
bill of the play. His comment ran as follows:
No fees for programs? I should think not, indeed! You find a huge
stack of them under your very nose, and you can take any number you
like, from one to one hundred. The difficulty Is to find the actual
program when you have possessed yourself of one of these bulky
pamphlets, for there is only a “halfpennyworth of program” amid “an
intolerable deal of sack” in the way of advertisements and facetiæ.
But Mr. Scott failed to mention the worst feature of the American
programs—the black smut left on the ladies’ gloves and the men’s
knuckles from the smudgy type with which they are printed. The sixpence
one must part with in order to become possessed of a London house-bill
is really not begrudged in exchange for the neat card, folded at the two
sides to make it convenient for the pocket and on which the most
prominent features are the details respecting the play you have come to
see.
In New York the program concession has been for years in the hands of a
big firm which has paid the theaters large sums for the privilege of
distributing bills of the play, and audiences have had to submit in
patience to what this monopoly was pleased to give them. But there is
hope ahead and Joe Weber deserves the credit for being the pioneer in a
worthy innovation to make theatergoing the all round pleasure it ought
to be.
Just before he closed the doors of his music hall for the summer, Mr.
Weber amazed his patrons by providing them with a _program de luxe_,
each enclosed in an oiled paper envelope, and printed in four colors on
heavy coated paper. To be sure, it consists of forty-two pages,
including the cover, but the bill of the play is in the exact center,
making it easy to find, and the advertisements are most attractively
displayed and illustrated.
The thing was got up by a firm of four hustling young men, who have
already thrown into a panic the older firm, causing them to announce for
this new season lithographed covers done in six colors. Whether as a
whole the thing will be as attractive as the Weber program remains to be
seen, but, in any case, the public are to be congratulated, for as the
spirit of competition has entered the field, audiences will reap the
benefit.
In London you buy your program from the young woman who shows you to
your seat, for whom this practical Clement Scott had no great liking. Of
this young woman Mr. Scott said:
I prefer the American “usher,” with the suave but determined manner,
to our haughty and flighty girls at home, who think it a condescension
to show you to your seat, the whereabouts of which they are usually as
ignorant of as you are yourself. In an American theater you are
marshaled to your seat with military regularity. In England you are at
the mercy of some Miss Tousle Head who, so far as her business is
concerned, is either insolently independent or sublimely ignorant.