Black Crook Dress Rehearsal

“In preparation for the reproduction tomorrow evening of ‘The Black Crook,’ there was a full dress rehearsal last evening, after giving this devil’s imp and his attending demons a refreshing rest of nearly three years. Had the famous Hindoo philosopher, Baboo Chesub Chunder Sen, been present at this rehearsal, with a knowing friend at his elbow to point out the distinguished representatives of the metropolitan police, the police courts, the bench and the bar, the city fathers and the literati among the favored spectators, the learned Baboo Chesub Chunder Sen would surely have left with the impression that this play, under the auspices of our city authorities and our guardians of law and order and our teachers of morality, had been devised for the purpose of teaching the principles of virtue, self-denial and moral philosophy at the expense of the Corporation. Messrs. Jarrett & Palmer, however, if they were to take this learned Brahmin into their confidence, would be apt to tell him that ‘The Black Crook’ is simply a philosophical device for gathering in the rupees; that some three years ago, after gathering as many bags of gold as would fill the ‘cave of the forty thieves,’ the ‘Crook’ was withdrawn because base imitators ‘had run it into the ground’—that a sufficient interval of rest has passed to make it fresh again for a season, and that our playgoing people, tired out in its turn with what they call ‘the legitimate drama,’ and opera bouffe, and the circus, the nigger minstrels, scientific lectures and women’s rights, will gladly welcome the relieving and reviving fascinations of the ‘Crook.’

“This is the philosophy of Jarrett & Palmer, and when they assure us that they have expended $45,000 in the embellishment of this reproduction we get something like an idea of their confidence that it will pay. We saw last night, as they say, that ‘many new improvements have been introduced, new scenes invented, new machinery devised, new costumes carefully selected,’ and that as a spectacular entertainment it will be better than the old ‘Crook’ and as good as new, especially with ‘the corps de ballet of one hundred ladies,’ including Bonfanti, Pauline Markham, Cora Adrrienne, Pagani, Luardi, and a cloud of others of what our learned Brahmins would call ‘the soul-entangling bayaderes.’ It can hardly be doubted that the ‘Crook’ to-morrow night will again be the lion of the town, and if the public will have it how can the enterprising managers refuse it?”