MUSIC AND DRAMA.

Evening Star, Issue 4045, 12 February 1876, Page 2 (Supplement)

MUSIC AND DRAMA.

Mr Charles Wheatleigh is having great success in Auckland as the Shaughraun. Mr J. P. Hydes and Miss Flora Anstead are now playing at the Victoria Theatre, Sydney. Mr Chapman, the wizard, has at length found an appreciative place. He is said to be drawing crowded houses in Levuka. In Sydney a preliminary meeting has been held to organise a private company to bring out a new Italian Opera Troupe to Australia.

j The journals of Milan announce the death of Marietta Brambilla, a once highly celebrated contralto. She sang for several seasons in Paris, between 1840 and 1850. The Hobart Town ' Mercury' takes Mr C. H. Templeton, the opera singer, to task for adopting a ridiculous and unnecessary alias. Mr T., it appears, is a native of Hobart Town, and his proper name is C. L. Pringle. A German operatic company will, in the course of next spring, take possession of Drury Lane Theatre, where the experiment of rendering Wagner's music will be entered upon. "Tannhauser" has already been translated for the purpose. So great has been the success of "The Shaughraun " at Drury Lane that, according to report, arrangements have already been made for continuing its " run " at the Adelphi, when the requirements of pantomime necessitate its removal from the larger house.

The Milanese journals speak in most enthusiastic terms of a new baritone singer, by name George Walker, Italianised into Giorgio Valcheri. They say that his voice is of extraordinary beauty, resonance, power, and compass, and that he sings and acts like an artist of the highest culture. An accident happened, while Wilson's Circus was performing in Wellington, to one of the horses named "Tiger," considered one of the best-trained animals in the whole troupe, '«Tiger" managed in some unexplained way to put his shoulder out while performing, and next day proved so totally lame that it is feared he is crippled for life. If so, it will represent a loss of some LSOO to the circus proprietor. Gounod is credited with the intention to set Moliere's comedy of " George Dandin " to music, employing the brilliant prose of the great playwright as the liretto. To those who complain that it is not customary to adapt music to prose, Gounod replies that oratorios are always composed in prose, and that there is no reason why operas should not be composed to those words, "which," he urges, "are not incompatible with the hythmic regularity of the musical meaGounod's " Romeo and Juliet" has j -ist gii'en a splendid triumph to Patti and Nicoleni, who are giving it in Moscow, where Patti has been re-cal'ed fifty-seven times in a single evening, Mdlle. Heilbron, meantime, has had a success almost as brilliant in St. Petersburg, where she. has been recalled a great number of times after each act of Faust.

The Americans are certainly a go-a-head race, and in many things excel their older and perhaps steadier cousins. Advertising, however, seems to have reached its climax there, for we can scarcely imagine anything to surpass the following ingenious way of bringing one's goods under the notice of the public. The New York 'Dramatic News' says :—" Out West somewhere, the other day, the performance of 'Camille' was supplemented by a decided novelty in stage appearances. The curtain went down on the death of the wretched victim to consumption, and the audience had shed the proper amount of tears, when a gentleman appeared before the foot-lights in full-dress suit. He said : ' Ladies and gentlemen, you have witnessed the death of Marguerite Gautier, and it has very properly appealed to your sympathies. This death would not have occurred in one so young had she used Dr Johnson's Cough Lozenges. They are an invaluable specific against consumption.' The audience was then permitted to retire." AX ATTRACTIVE EXTRAVAGANZA.

The enormous success of the theatrical adaptation of Horace Verne's amusing extravaganza of "The Journey Round the World in Eighty Days," has stimulated the wits of Messrs Vanloo, Leverrier, and Mortier, who have got up another extravaganza, to which they have given a name ("The Journey to the Moon") imitated from Verne's "Journey Around the Moon," to which Offenbach has composed the musis, and which, just brought out at the Gaiete Theatre, is the grand event of the moment. The ' S. M. Herald's' Paris correspondent says that such was the impatience of the public to witness the wonders of the new spectacle, that over 2,000 demands for tickets in excess of the number of places in the house were made for the first representation, when the Thumblest places, up to the very roof, were crammed with well-dressed people; the boxes being stuffed with as many extra seats as could oe made to stand in them, Thesuccessqfthenew piece was certain from the first scene of the first a,ct. And the crowd outside the theatre was as compact as the crowd within ; for a most admirable illuminated representation of the disc of our capricious satellite, with every mountain in relief, every sea and shadow distinctly pourtrayed, adorned the facade of the theatre—proclaiming to all passers that the new spectacle, impatiently expected for a fortnight past, was being witnessed by the lucky mortals who had obtained admission. The authors of the new piece had undertaken to quiz the people of the earth by representing the lunarians as doing exactly the contrary of what is done down here; but they selected for their satire, only points capable of affording pretext for the most gorgeous scenery, all of which has been pub on the stage with an utter regardlessness of cost. The following are a few of the scenes:—The interior of the cupola of the Paris Observatory, with its telescopes, globes, quadrants, registers, &0., the casting of the great cannon—a wonderful scene of molten metal, workmen, fires, hammers, &c. ; entrance of the party into the cannon, perched on the top of a lofty mountain ; the near view of the moon, faint at first, gradually brightening, and presently coming out of the clouds and showing a great city of fantastic architecture, surrounded by splendid gardens and landscapes, lit up by magnificent sunlight; instantaneous vegetation—-plants and flowers growing up and blossoming as you look on; the palace of glasß and the galleries of mother-of-pearl, guarded by a geant ; splendid effects, and the geant an oddity that sends the spectators into roars of laughter; dance of chimeras; lunar landscape with snow ; ballet of snow-storm —one of the most splendid and marvellous scenes ever seen on a

stage, and that sends the spectators into ecstacies. Ttie famous scenes* of the volcano —indescribable, but all wonderfully fine. The exiles go down in an ingenious sort of basket that lands them on the floor of the crater; wonder through galleries till they come to a vast grotto full of stalactites, and a hole at the farther end where a gleam of the subterraneous fires is visible. Suddenly, the volcauo begins to grow, an earthquake shakes the grotto, the burning lava pours in, and the exiles ruah wildly about seeking an issue, but in vain. One of them climbs on to a mass of petrified lava, the new lava overthrows it with the unlucky mortal perched upon it. After the invasion of the molten | lava, comes a shower of cinders hiding everything on the stage. This shower over, we see the party on the summit of a vol- | cano, surrounded by a landscape of desolation. Suddenly the earth rises, lighting up everything with a splendid earth light that transcends the brightness of moonlight, in the ratio of its superiority to its satelite ; and the earth, drawing nearer and nearer, shows its continents, rivers, seas, mountains, &c, as the party, driven towards it by the eruption, are thus conveyed back to their native planet. The dresses of the actors are equal to the magnificence of the decorations, and the music gay, sparkling, and charming, completes the elements of a "success" which will doubtless be chronicled among the most brilliant and lucrative of the epoch.