White Fawn

Notes that the performance now “terminates at eleven o’clock.”

““Niblo’s—The White Fawn.—If crowded houses be a guarantee of the success of a piece, then the ‘White Fawn’ at Niblo’s is a genuine and great success. The scenery and the ballet are certainly of an order that will draw crowds for some time to come, and the costumes and mechanical effects are magnificent. The piece has undergone a great deal of pruning and is now brought within the compass of three hours and a half. Yet the dramatic part cannot be brought up even to the level of the ‘Black Crook,’ and the music must be entirely changed in order to equal that famous spectacle. In cutting down the dramatic and singing parts the management has committed one great blunder. The best part of the singing has been cut out and a miserable burlesque on the ‘Grand Duchess’ and ‘Champagne Charlie’ has been retained. Why have not the managers or the leader of the orchestra musical brains enough to make use of the splendid vocal materials they have and not bore their hearers with such lamentable stuff as is now inflicted nightly on the patrons of Niblo’s…The rôle of Aquilina, the fairy of the lake, is invested with more importance than it deserves, through Miss Stockton’s admirable acting and singing.”

“Went through the weather to see ‘The White Fawn’ at Niblo’s, a grand new show piece, manifestly got up at very great cost, & said to surpass ‘The Black Crook’ itself, which drew crowded houses for a year and a half.  Ballet, spectacle, machinery, & pink legs are its chief constituents.  The dialogue is senseless, the plot undiscoverable, & the music commonplace--plagiarisms from the Grande Duchesse excepted.  But the dresses, properties, decorations &c are novel & lavish--except the costumes of the ballet girls which are the reverse of lavish in quantity, though various & pretty in design & color.  A grand procession of fishes, oysters, & lobsters is very grotesque & carefully equipped.  The final tableau or ‘transformation scene’ is particularly elaborate & pretty.  A scene shifter would call it gorgeous.  In a meretricious sort of way it is quite artistic, with its slowly shifting masses of color, changing lights, & groups of good-looking young women (with very little on) nestling or hanging about everywhere.  But the whole production depends for its success mainly on the well-formed lower extremities of female humanity.  It is doubtless the most showy, & the least draped, specimen of what may be called the Feminine-Femoral School of dramatic art ever produced in New York. House packed--men mostly--& enthusiastic.

Curious “progress” has the drama made since the days of old Samuel Johnson—Burke—Reynolds & Davy Garrick!”

“The curtain now descends on the final scene of the ‘White Fawn’ within a few minutes of 11 o’clock. A difference of three hours between the first performance and the last. It seems to be an almost matter of impossibility to bring ‘first nights’ within enjoyable limits. Rehearse as actors may they still are unable to make speec and action glide easy and cut and cancel dialogue and scene as a manager or author may; he is still unable to tell what to retain and what to leave out for the saving of time, until the unerring judgment of the first night’s audiences signifies by its silence or its yawning the good things that it can spare.”