Copyright © 2020 by Wendy Waszut-Barrett
In 1920, Thomas G. Moses wrote, “The Madam and I saw Margaret Anglin in ‘The Woman of Bronze’ and it was very good.” “The Madam” was Moses’ wife, Susan “Ella” Robbins Moses. Both turned 64 in 1920. Moses would live for another fourteen years after that.
“The Woman of Bronze” was written by Henry Kistemaeker and Eugene Delard, adapted for the stage by Paul Kester. The show premiered at the Powers’ Theatre in Chicago, starring Margaret Anglin and went on tour. By the end of January, the show was featured at the Grand in Topeka, Kansas, and by February was playing in Sacramento, California. By the fall the show was featured at the at the Frazee Theatre, Forty-second street, Manhattan. By the time is appeared in New York, Margaret Anglin, John Halliday and Mary Fowler were featured as the leads from Sept. 7, 1920-April 1921.
The plot involves a husband’s infidelity with his artistic model.
Percy Husband wrote a review for the “Chicago Tribune” on January 9, 1920 (page 13):
“When Miss Anglin and the emotions are effectively in confluence, as they are in ‘The Woman of Bronze,’ you may expect to experience all the rapid and sympathetic heart-beats common to the theater. She knows her way about the ‘situations.’ Her voice is attuned to words of passion and distress; her individuality has great and friendly resources, her intelligence is one of the finest of the American stage, and her knowledge of ways and means is not excelled among the actors of the day. Her luck in the choice of plays, is not always good, but she makes the best of it.
“Miss Anglin’s present implement is a bounteous exploitation of the whilom triangle. She, as the adoring wife of a successful sculptor, loses her artist to a youthful kinswoman, enduring the bereavement now with controlled and quiet forbearance and again battling against it in temptuous rebellion. The circumstances permit her to exercise the full of her art and her splendid tricks and devices.
“You see her first, happy and carefree, with her husband and her friends at their summer home (the time is the present, the place twenty miles from New York), discussing his great work, The Woman of Bronze, a statue commemorative of the victory of the allies and their associate in the war. There you have Miss Anglin in her light and delicate mood, the smart and humorous woman of the world, saying and doing with possibly too much precision the right thing. You admire her so much that when, a little later, her husband and her cousin embrace in the gloaming and utter the wild and broken phrases of guilty amour, you wish that she might not steal in a catch them at it. But she does, and you regard her highly as, with her world tumbling about her white shoulders, she tells them that it is time for dinner.
“Then again, when it is teatime in the second act, and there is sift music, chatter, and sex-epigrams, she and the raisonneur sit upon the divan in the middle of the stage, close to the footlights, and she tells him of her miseries. Of how she has followed her husband and his sweetheart to their rendezvous, and standing in the rain, has watched the light in their chamber go up and go out. A lady of the streets saw her thus, she says, and pitying her, as one unhappy woman does another, pressed money into her hand and put her in a cab. This recital, which is heard only by the audience, is disguised. The others in the party think that Miss Anglin is whispering merely a funny story, because she laughs to drown the noise of her breaking heart.
“If one could be critical about a drama, he might suspect that the language in ‘The Woman of Bronze’ is perhaps superhuman in a rich, dank, tropical way. ‘Take your hands off his heart,’ says Miss Anglin to her successor in ‘A Woman of Bronze,’ just before she draws a dagger and threatens to kill her, and the speech which Mr. Fred Eric, as sculptor husband, addresses to his statue, just before he shatters it to bits, is that of a critic rather than a human being. He says that it is carnal and soulless, and that its bronze eyes are sightless, rather than gleaming with the spirit of sacrifice and victory.
“At any rate, ‘The Woman of Bronze’ is deliberate, premeditated and according to order. Paul Kester, who adapted it from the collaboration of Henry Kistemaecker and Eugene Delard, deprives it of none of its routine possibilities, and it is by no means a botch. The acting is very good, and it includes that of Fred Eric as the sculptor, Walter Connolly as the honest friend, Miss Marion Barney as a merry widow, Sydney Mather as a semi-villain, and others, among them Miss Ethel Remy, who is rather fugitive and fawn-like as the ingenue who spilled the beans.”
Three years later, “The Woman in Bronze” became a silent movie. Moses and his wife also attended the movies quite frequently. In 1920 he wrote, “We still keep up with the movie attendance. We do not always strike a good picture.” I wonder if they ever saw the movie version of “The Woman in Bronze.”
To be continued…
