Charley White Company

“First week of Mlle. Annetta Galletti and Mons. Cardella.”

“Charley White’s, always droll and amusing, was excessively funny last night, and, in accordance with the programme of the evening’s entertainment, the hall was filled to suffocation with a ‘large, appreciative and discriminating audience,’ who showed their appreciation by the most vociferous applause, intermingled with cat-calls and the shrillest kind of whistling for whatever pleased them, and their discrimination by hissing in a very democratic manner and in the true old Bowery style, without regard to sex or time, at whatever was foreign to their feelings or did not quite come up to the standard of what they considered legitimate acting. A person fond of the ludicrous can derive almost as much pleasure from the said ‘appreciative and discriminating audience’ as from the ‘Great Combination Troupe’ itself. Their comic antics over some telling point in the performance, or plantation dance; their unmusical shouts and boisterous laughter, together with the strong, queer and telling remarks which they invariably pass upon the actors, never fail to set the more staid and less discriminating portion of the audience in a roar, and not unfrequently [sic] convulses the actors themselves. The songs, acting, dances and ballet are all good, and the crowded houses nightly attest in what high appreciation the ‘discriminating audience’ hold the enterprising manager, who has just added Mlle. Annetta Galletti and Mons. Cardella, ‘two of the best dancers in America’—so we are assured by the bills—to the already famous troupe.”