Venue(s):
Leonard Jerome’s Theatre
Manager / Director:
Lester Wallack
Event Type:
Play With Music
Status:
Published
Last Updated:
11 February 2016
“In select circles the programme of a series of amateur entertainments, to be given for the increase of this fund, and in which the very flower of the best society in New-York is to take the leading part, is now the exciting topic of conversation. These performances, which will comprise evenings of tableux [sic], evenings of amateur theatricals and evenings of amateur opera, are to take place at Mr. Jerome’s private theatre, and only before the most dainty audiences; the tickets for them being obtainable only at fancy prices and after the most fastidious introduction. The tableux [sic] and the dramas are being rehearsed under Mr. Lester Wallack’s direction.”
“The living tableaux were first introduced in fashionable society as a compromise with the wild desire to become something else which is known to exist, even in the hearts of very pretty young ladies of rank and wealth, and have been preferred to plays and operas, by the elegantes, who soon found studying a part was an intolerable bore, that rehearsing it twenty times to enact it once was a great loss of time, and that there never were more than three good parts in a piece of a dozen characters, so that too many of them had to play second fiddle. And there is this beauty about Tableaux Vivants: in the course of an evening, everybody can be what she likes best to appear, and so nobody is slighted. If there are twelve ambitious ladies, there can be twelve pictures, and a special heroine for each: whereas in play or opera, there can only be one queen, one confidante, and one page—and all the others must be female peasants of a monotonous cast.
All this winter, therefore, the living tableaux have been extremely popular in the best society, and unusually brilliant and costly in all instances. None, however, have been more magnificent in detail, or have been participated in with more earnestness by the very flower of New-York society, than the recent entertainments which were given at Mr. Leonard W. Jerome’s elegant little private theatre, under the direction of the ladies of the Southern Relief Society. The third, and last, of the first series of these was given on Tuesday night, before a rare and radiant audience, and the programme was altogether filled by the acknowledged leaders and beauties of our first circles… On Tuesday evening, there were twelve tableaux represented, with all the splendors of rich new costumes and all the accessories of appropriate scenery and cunningly devised emblems suggested by the subjects chosen…[Several of these are described in some detail, one including music:] A representation of the ‘Assumption of the Madonna’ [was] beautiful and sublime…Mrs. Gardiner Howland, who is called by many the most beautiful woman in society, sustained the leading figure, while her sister, Miss Delaney, sang with remarkable feeling the ‘Madonna Song.’”