188.—FUN ON THE STAGE.
Actors and singers have their fun on the stage as well as off. On looking over stage annals we find how this one would take a few whiffs from his cigar when the stage business kept him behind a bit of scenery for a minute; how that one would have a pot of her favorite porter handed up through a trap if occasion offered; how this or that irrelevant remark, made under the breath, came near upsetting the whole course of mimic events. As a piece of stage fun calculated to disturb the gravity of those in the immediate vicinity, the following was a fair sample:—
In the opera of "The Corsair," during a duet which took place on the Corsair's vessel, the audience could see that the people on the stage were suffering in the attempt to restrain their mirth. The cause, invisible to the house, was that some joker, during the rocking motion of the ship, had stuck his head up through a trap and, offering a couple of basins, had solicitously inquired, "Any gentleman require the services of the steward?"
Some actors and singers identify themselves with the character essayed, and their emotions are stirred to their profoundest depths by the joys and sorrows, the good and evil, the love and hate that make up the sum of such characters. Others, on the contrary, consider it a vitiation of art to permit their feelings to dominate them in any degree. They must always be above and superior to the character and the emotion if they are to dominate that emotion and are to be free from the caprice of the moment.
So far do some singers carry the latter idea that their simulation of a part becomes, as we might say, automatic; and while their auditors think them torn and swayed by some passionate emotion, they may be enjoying some bit of by-play on the stage, entirely opposite to the assumed emotion.
For instance, it is related that Mme. Devrient, when, as "Leonora," she offered Haizinger, the "Florestan" of the evening, the crust of bread that the libretto prescribes for the latter, and he was somewhat slow in taking it, impatiently whispered to him:—
"Why in the deuce don't you take it? Do you want it buttered?"