The same year that the Sosman & Landis Annex studio opened, an article appeared in the Chicago Sunday Tribune, “Paint Mimic Scenes, Men Who Have Found Fame in the Wing and Drop Curtains” (Dec, 18, 1892, page 41). Here is the continuation of that article started in installment #245.
“The cost of painting scenery is usually exaggerated in the play-bills, nevertheless it is a heavy expense. Manager Henderson estimated the actual cost of scenery in the various burlesque productions at the Chicago Opera House as follows: “Arabian Nights,” $14,000; “Crystal Slipper,” $20,000; “Sinbad,” $20,000. In the last burlesque, “Ali Baba” the cost must have been heavier. The gold foil alone cost $800. One of the heaviest scenes ever set on the local stage was the rainbow palace in Duff’s production of “The Queen’s Mate.” This was largely due to the labyrinth of circular stairways that honeycombed the stage.
As for the cost of interiors, the second act of “Diplomacy,” presented last summer at the Columbia Theater, including furniture, made a bill of $2,600. The scenery for “The Ensign” cost over $10,000, and another earlier melodrama, “The Soudan,” represented over $12,000. Perhaps the finest series of classical stagings ever given Shakespearean productions in this country were furnished by Edwin Booth for the theatre bearing his name in New York. Probably the most expensive spectacle ever put on was “Jalma,” and the most expensive scenic production was that of “Saranapalus” at Booth’s Theater, New York, 1876. Few stages in the world ever had the curtain rise upon such wealth of scenery as that of our Auditorium. It had complete sets of scenes for forty standard operas, the equipment costing $50,000. All of the uncut drops weigh at least 300 pounds, are sixty-eight feet wide and thirty-eight feet high. The “horizon” that surrounds the stage is the largest piece of theatrical canvas in the world, being 300 feet in length and fifty-six in height.
Expense of scenic productions in the country is comparatively slight when contrasted with notable ones abroad. The cost of Boucicault’s “Balil and Bijou” at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden, in 1867, was over $60,000. Blanchard’s “Puss in Boots,” at the same house two years later was equally expensive. “Excelsior,” when produced in Paris ten years ago, made an expensive bill that would have terrified our pioneers in spectacle who put on such large figures on the bills for the original “Black Crook” and “White Fawn.” Twelve years ago the paint bridge of Covent Garden was at times simultaneously occupied by Hawes Cravens, the Cuthberths, the Telbins, Matt Morgan, Graves, Hicks, Dangerfield, and oters at work on the mammoth drops, 50×75 feet. It is said that William Telbin, the favorite artist of Henry Irving, spends six weeks painting a small front cloth.
Little wonder that the productions under those conditions have so much genuine artistic merit and historic accuracy.”
To be continued…
