Tag: 1922 Page 1 of 4

Troupe of Actors and Actresses Direct From China Present Drama Thousands of Years Old With All Color of the Orient

No Curtain – No Intermission – No Scenery – Property Man Always Moving About Stage Shifting Cushions, Covers, Etc.

Orchestra on One Side of Stage Provides Weird Music – Actors Sing in a High Falsetto – Gorgeous Costumes.

By Gregory Clark, June 10, 1922.

(Editor’s Note: since this was written over 100 years ago, the attitudes of a westerner to Chinese theatre emphasized the strangeness and the novelty of it all).

Is your appetite for amusement jaded?

Have you made the rounds of the entertainments Toronto provides and found them all flavored alike?

Then there is one thing you have overlooked. You haven’t seen the Chinese players at the National Theatre¹ in the heart of the Ward.

In a little old theatre, far off the well-beaten tall of amusement, there is going on every night before crowded houses of thrilled Orientals something so bizarre, quaint, beautiful and gorgeously colorful, that it stuns the senses of the few white people who have been fortunate enough to discover it.

It is a troupe of thirty Chinese actors and actresses direct from China, with a repertory of about forty of the classic tragedies and romances of Chinese literature. They have played in Vancouver and are spending a few weeks in Toronto before proceeding to the States.

They are playing to the Chinese, of course. Not a word and scarcely a movement of the play is intelligible to the stranger in the audience.

But to get the shock of your theatre-going life, you don’t need to understand it.

The gorgeous costumes, which make Oriental spectacles on the English stage seem tawdry, the posturing, miming and gesturing of the actors, the weird, shrill music and the constant din of the great brass gongs of the orchestra, creates a sensation that is new and fresh and stimulating to us who are the victims of realism on the stage.

For there is no atom of realism in the Chinese drama. It is a monstrous mixture of the ballet, pantomime, marionettes and grand opera, clothed in a symbolism that reaches back through the centuries. The Chinese stagecraft has not changed in a thousand years.

The Chinese players on Teraulay street² have not adapted themselves to the National Theatre. They have ignored the theatre. It has seats in it, and a stage. That’s all they need.

The rest is a simplicity that takes the breath out of you. There is no scenery, no curtain, the auditorium is not darkened. Stage and audience are both brightly lighted.

The orchestra does not sit in the pit. It sits on the stage, to one side. It is in shirt-sleeves. In slack moments of the play, while gorgeously garbed mandarins strut and posture in front of the ever-changing hangings on the back-wall of the stage, the orchestra lights up cigarets, or drinks from a dipper.

There is no curtain, and therefore no intermission. The Chinese play moves at furious speed. The property man is not off-stage, but is always on the stage, dressed in conventional black, a strangely intrusive figure among all the fantastic actors. But this property man manages the few properties required, which are a couple of small tables, three chairs, about fifty different silk curtains and a hundred gorgeous silk covers. Never leaving the stage for a moment, he quickly switches the scene from the home of a humble magistrate to the palace of the emperor in the capital, merely by changing the silk covers on the two tables and the three chairs, and the gorgeous curtains on the two entrances to the stage.

There is the reverse of realism for you. This property man and his properties occupy the center of the stage, and yet you are not supposed to see him. You are expected to have enough imagination to see that it is a garden on the stage, though not a stick or a twig is there to indicate it.

And when the two gorgeous lovers, in the midst of the imaginary garden, sing their formal love song, the orchestra in its shirt sleeves and suspenders ten feet from them, producing the weird music of the Orient, you must sustain the illusion when this black clad property man steps out, at the proper moment, and coming between the lovers, places a silken cushion for the girl to kneel on.

Your first moments of the Chinese drama will fill you with a confusion of amusement and alarm. All plays are accompanied by music. This music consists of the sound of two huge brass cymbals, one brass gong, one small ox-horn fiddle with a range of one octave, one small mud-turtle shell mandolin, a wooden banjo, and a time-keeper, which is the beating upon two hollow wooden boxes with bamboo sticks. At times, the string players lay aside their instruments and take up the pipes, which are much like a single pipe of the Scotch bagpipes, and have the same wild, uncertain note.

Parts of the play are sung to the sound of these instruments, and the rest is chanted to the endless accompaniment of the gongs and cymbals and the ox-horn fiddle. The gongs crash at the end of every line of verse, for the dramas are always written in verse.

To add to the westerner’s confusion at these crashing and screaming sounds, the actors do not sing or chant in a normal voice, but use a conventional stage voice, which is falsetto, both with the men and the women, with regular droppings of the voice to a low key for contrast.

Often, the voices cannot be heard at all, so high are they, and so violent is the musical accompaniment.

Everything is ruled by a conventionality that has the ballet and the pantomime outclassed for subtlety. There being no scenery, the actor comes on the stage, but is not seen by, and does not see the other characters on the stage, until he “enters” the imaginary room the others are in. This he does by lifting one foot, as if he were stepping over the door frame of the room. To see these actors all striding and mincing about the bare stage, lifting their feet over the door sill as faithfully as if the door were there, pushing the sliding panels of doors to and fro, manipulating the latches of gates thinner than air, come in prancing on imaginary steeds, which act must be performed just so, allowing the steed to caracole, and come to a spirited halt, then the rider throwing his leg over the saddle to dismount, and hanging his tufted whip on an unseen saddle horn, (the whip falling to the floor), needs an imagination to cope with it. It is so easy to be realistic, to have a stage crammed with realistic properties, instead of a couple of chairs, a few resplendent arrases of hand embroidered silk, and a thousand quaint gestures and postures.

Each actor, as he comes on the stage, is heralded by a tremendous to-do on the gongs. The greater the personage, the greater the racket. He advances to the front of the stage, and in a queer falsetto voice, in a monotonous rhythm, announces who he is and what he is about to do. Then he turns his back, lifts one foot as if stepping over the door frame, and is then supposed to be in the presence of the other actors.

Regardless of the action of the drama, the property man, who is not supposed to be noticed, keeps continually changing the magnificent curtains which cover the two entrances at the back of the stage. This change of curtains has nothing to do with the scenery. Like the music, it is merely something beautiful to attend the action of the play. And many of the curtains bear on them embroidered Chinese characters. These curtains are gifts to the company from audiences or individuals, and the writing on them expresses appreciation of the actors, collectively or individually. Combining, thus, entertainment and advertising.

The costumes are, one would say, the originals from which Chu Chin Chow³ costumes were economically copied. They are simply gorgeous.

There are several Chinese girls in the cast. Slight, inexpressibly/ graceful, mannered, swaying, the flowers of an ancient childlike civilization.

The scene shifts from the home of the hero to the high court of the province. It is managed thus: The actors march out the door on the right, and march in the door on the left. The property man has swiftly hung up two new and still more beautiful curtains. We have traveled a hundred miles.

We see them worshipping the ancestors before departing on a journey. We are present at the prayers before the execution of the heroine, when tapers are lighted and incense floats up, and to the weird tumult of the orchestra, with both big and little pipes going, the actors sing the prayers for all about to depart. Yet there, on one side of this artistic scene are the musicians in their shirt sleeves, in the full glare of the footlights, sweating hard; and the drab property man moves to and fro in the scene, a distressing embodied spirit.

This is the oldest drama in the world. It dates back beyond the Greek, beyond the sacred dancers of Israel. Surely we have got our ballet, our drama, our grand opera from these quaint people out of the east, though our stage carpenters and property men have made it for us so real that there is no more drama and no more imagination in it.

What of the audience? Out there in the lighted auditorium, the swarthy rows sit, thrilled, smiling at the antics of the comedian, who dances and postures like the Russians, who learned of the ballet across the Siberian plains from these yellow mannequins. At the love music, their faces light up with a strange look. It is queer, bitter music to a westerner. It is the love song of home to these stolid, peering Cantonese.

The audience is all munching something. Is it peanuts?

“No!” protests our guide and interpreter, “they are eating melon seeds, which it is customary to do at the theatre.”

Customary!

Custom, rule, convention, every gesture, every note of music, every syllable proclaimed just so, in high falsetto voice, after rules and customs laid down hundreds of years ago, unchanged and changeless, and full of a precise beauty swathed in riotous colors that must fill the white-clad angels with envy.

The Chinese drama, in its humble theatre and its homely surroundings, is a mental burr that sticks to the brain. It is meaningless to the stranger.

But he can’t forget it.

Editor’s Notes:

1. The National Theatre started out as the Big Nickel and later became the Rio Theatre. It was at 373 Yonge Street and was torn down around 2019. ↩︎
2. Today, Terauley street is known as Bay Street. ↩︎
3. Chu Chin Chow was a musical comedy that was very popular from 1916 to the time of this article in 1922. ↩︎

By Gregory Clark, February 11, 1922.

The flim-flammer is the hardest kind of crook to catch, for he neither breaks in nor leaves traces. His victim usually sees him but a moment. He operates like the hawk – out of the blue and back again.

A humble little man in his shirt sleeves and bare head came into a Yonge street drug store. In his hand he carried an envelope stamped and addressed, but not sealed.

To the clerk he said:

“Could you give me a ten-dollar bill for ten ones? I want to mall the money in this letter, but the ones are too bulky.”

“Sure,” said the clerk.

The small man removed a bunch of one dollar bills from the letter and handed them to the clerk. The clerk handed him a ten spot.

Then the clerk counted the bills and found only nine.

“Hold on,” he said. “You’re one short here,”

“Oh,” exclaimed the stranger, taking the ones and counting them. “That’s funny. Too bad.”

And he stuffed the one dollar bills back in the envelope in full view of the clerk. Then he said:

“Here, hold this till I run back and get another dollar.”

And handing the clerk the letter, but keeping the clerk’s ten in his hand, the little man in the bare head and shirt sleeves, left the store – never to return.

But it was not just one dollar he got away with. For when the clerk, after ten minutes had elapsed, examined the letter, he found nothing in it but paper. The flim-flammer had switched envelopes. In some neighboring hotel or shop, he had left his hat and coat. This man worked his game on six stores in three Yonge street blocks in twenty minutes.

Another form of flim-flam recently worked successfully on several stores on Roncesvalles and Queen street is the $20 bill stunt. The crook picks a store where there is a girl in charge. He buys some small ten cent article and hands a $20 bill. After he has got his change, he says:

“Oh. never mind that $20! I’ve got the right change. Just give me back my $20”

The girl hands him the $20, he pays down the ten cents, and before the girl grasps the fact that there is $19.90 coming back to her, the crook is out the door and gone.

It is astonishing how this swindle works. There is a confusion in most people’s minds in money-changing that provides the cover for this particular flim-flam.

Foreigners are particular victims of flim-flammers of their own race. An Italian, who was carrying $3,000 trust funds on him, made the acquaintance of an elderly man who had a remarkable lockable purse. The elder man offered to buy his young friend a similar purse for the safe keeping of his $3.000. He did so. And in St. James Park he presented the purse and locked the $3,000 in it for him.

“Now,” said the elder man, “this is my key. I’ve left yours at the hotel. Meet me at the hotel for lunch, and I’ll give you your key.”

The young Italian, his new purse containing the $3,000 safe in his pocket, was on hand for lunch. But his friend failed to turn up. Growing suspicious, he tore open the locked purse and found some clipped newspapers. The crook had switched purses.

Strangely enough, this young Italian, returning heart-broken to Italy, met his crooked friend on board ship and had him arrested in England. But the Canadian government would not go to the trouble of extraditing him.

One of the oddest swindles, not much removed from the flim-flam yet based on a system by which respected citizens of Toronto have made themselves wealthy, was recently pulled off in New York, with a few Toronto people involved.

Two respectable and well-known financial men went up to Petrolea¹, Ont., and bought a tract of land.

Then they went to men with money in New York and put up a novel scheme.

“Give us your money,” they said, “to invest in this oil property. We will dig only one well, and if we don’t strike oil within one year we will give every cent of your money back to you. To safe guard you, we will bank our money in care of a well-known trust company.”

This unusual plan at once attracted money, and the two operators sold in all three million dollars of stock.

This three million they deposited with the trust company.

They then spent ten thousand dollars on sinking a well near Petrolea. And at the end of the year, no oil was struck. So the two financiers returned to New York, drew their three million out of the trust company, and returned every cent to their investors, with the remark that it was a gamble and nothing lost.

But the trust company paid 4 per cent. on that $3,000,000 deposit. which amounted in one year to $120,000!

This the two financiers took for themselves, no mention having been made in the promise to the investors of interest!

A tale is going around about a well-dressed man buying a $500 diamond at a big Toronto Jewelry store, for which he offered his check. The Jewelers asked for references, and the stranger gave the name of the manager of the big hotel at which he was staying. Calling him up, the jewelers were informed that the man was undoubtedly good for the $500.

The stranger then crossed Yonge street to a small jeweler and offered the diamond for $100. This jeweler, sensing something crooked, slipped out his back door on pretence of testing the stone and went across to the big jewelers. When they heard of the offer, they immediately called the police. When the detectives arrested the stranger he protested that the ring was his, and he could do what he pleased with it. But he was taken to headquarters.

Then by telegram the jewelers made enquiry of the stranger’s bank in an American city, and found to their dismay that there was plenty of money to cover the check.

They went up to withdraw their charge and apologize, and the stranger said:

“Gentlemen, this episode will just cost you $1,000.”

The story goes that they paid it.

But the unfortunate part of it is that there appears to be no truth in the story.

Editor’s Note:

1. Petrolia is a town in Ontario. A little searching around seems to indicate that it was once called Petrolea but the railway companies misspelled it as Petrolia later, and that stuck.. ↩︎

By Gregory Clark, October 21, 1922.

If it is neighbors you want, go north.

If you are sick of the soft, fickle hand of city brotherhood, head for some place beyond North Bay.

If you are seeking the Land of the Golden Rule, you will find it, chances are, in a blackened and forsaken and dismal country lying between Cobalt and Englehart…

—

An old man comes limping up the hill to the relief car at Charlton. He must be all of seventy. His overcoat is six sizes too large for him. A boy’s cap perches on top of his old grey head. His broken shoes are sodden with slush. He seeks each spot he sets his foot. He winces with each step.

As he approaches the little group huddled about the door of the lone express car, a woman sitting on a box rises to give the old man her place.

“Sit down, woman,” says the old man. “A fine day, everybody?”

It isn’t. But they all agree it is.

He rests against the car. Presently his turn comes to stand before the opulent open door.

“Now, dad, what?” says the constable dishing out supplies.

“Somethin’ warm for an old woman and an old man,” says the old fellow.

“Well, you’ve got a coat,” begins the constable.

“Oh, ’tain’t for me,” says the old man. “It’s for an old couple, neighbors of mine. They are too old to come, so I come for them. They…”

“Were you burned out?” queries the constable.

“Me and them and the whole concession,” says the old man. “We are all starting over again in W—‘s barn. Now, the old woman, she needs a cloak…”

“How far have you come?”

“Oh, three, four mile.”

Out come priceless things from the express car – coats, sweaters, stockings, heavy wool underclothes.

The old man’s arms heap up. A boy steps over and says —

“I’ll help you carry them, mister.”

“You go help your own father,” says the old man, sternly.

And down the hill he goes limping, under a large bundle tied in a sheet.

A neighbor.

—

A big, mustached man is standing at a crossroads, his back to the driving rain.

Every party that comes trudging up the road has women and children in it. The big fellow halts them all.

“Where are you heading?”

“Englehart,” they answer.

“It’ll be dark in an hour. Never make it to-night. My place is half a mile up the side road here. Something to eat and room for the woman and kids in the house if you’ll share the barn with me.”

“Thanks, mister.”

The heavy-hearted little parties turn off the lonely road up the muddy side road.

And the neighbor stands with his big back to the spinning rain, watching up the desolate highroad.

—

A middle-aged man sits in the shelter of a bit of ruined brick wall. In his arms is cuddled a baby in a piece of soiled white blanket.

“A pretty baby,” I say to him. “Is it your only child?”

He blushes with the violence of the northerner.

“This ain’t mine,” he says. “Mine is all growed up. This one belongs to a young woman that took sick and they took her out to New Liskeard in a buggy. I’m carrying her baby in.”

“Why, it’s miles!” I exclaim.

“Well, I’ve come miles. But I’ll meet a car pretty soon, I figure. Anyway, it don’t matter – he’s nice and warm.”

—

Amid the ruins of what once was a house, a barn and a cow stable, a broad young man is toiling with an axe and some long nails and blackened remnants of timber.

Both his hands are swathed in dirty bandages. Above the bandages his wrists show scarlet and raw. He handles his axe gingerly, clumsily.

He proudly surveys the pitiful little lean-to he has made out of brittle charred boards.

“What’s this you’re making?” I ask.

“Well,” says he, resting gratefully. “It’s a sort of a cow shed. If my hands weren’t burned I could cut some logs out of that bit of swale over yonder that escaped the burn. But this’ll do fine, for a while.”

“Was this your homestead?”

“No, it belonged to a fellow I worked for, summer before last. He got all messed up saving his own kids and his neighbors, so I says to him I’ll fix up a shelter for his cows.”

—

If you don’t believe these legends, go and see for yourself.

Editor’s Note: Greg was sent to cover the Great Haileybury Fire that ravaged the Timiskaming District from October 4 to 5, 1922. It has been called one of the ten worst natural disasters in Canadian history.

By Gregory Clark, September 2, 1922.

On the Midway, everybody is a moron.

A moron, according to the psychologists, is “a high grade imbecile, with the mental age of a child of eleven years.”

Aside from the fact that this is a dirty crack at boys and girls of eleven, it is a pretty good description of the Midway.

Mind you, we are not asseverating (quaint Victorian word) that everyone who goes into the Midway is a moron. Our point is that as soon as he enters the Midway he becomes a moron – a high grade imbecile with a mental age of eleven.

Is it the bright paint, the gaudy canvas, the barking barkers, the primitive music that throws a spell over us and reduces us to morons? Or is it the psychic effect of a mob, whose massed personality overwhelms the individual personality, and reduces all for the moment to a common level of intelligence?

There is something decidedly spooky about the Midway.

Observe what happens to this large, thick, masterful looking man. He is the president and general manager of a flourishing manufacturing business. He is an officer of the Canadian Manufacturers’ Association. His golf handicap is four. His poker handicap is nil. He has a hundred and thirty cases in his cellar and is practically a teetotaller. In a word, he is a successful man.

Yet, look at him.

He is the bear cat of a party of four – his wife, another thick gentleman and wife. No young ‘uns in the party.

His collar is wilted. He has just consumed. a hot dog in three bites, and is hollering “C’mon, c’mon!” to the others, and is pointing to the Ferris wheel.

His face is red. There is a dab of mustard on his coat. His shoes are dusty, his clothes awry. Little would you think that to-morrow morning, with a flirt of his pen, he can close a factory employing four hundred men, or raise the price of washing machines. He acts like a boy of eleven. He looks like a high grade imbecile. He is, temporarily, a moron.

Or this lady, here, with the attractive white hair and the eyes the color of polished mahogany. Would you think she was one of the eight intellectual women of Toronto? Would you suspect that she has raised a family of three already prominent lawyers and is the vice-president of nineteen women’s organizations?

Her specialty to-day is freaks. She has been into every side show from the glass blowers to the wild west show. But her passion is freaks. She has had her fortune told by means of a paper out of a glass tube, but she has been in to see the gen-oo-wine Siamese twins three times. She goes in no spirit of mockery, but with the idea of getting an eye-full in those hot brown eyes, as thrilled as any girl of eleven. As a matter of fact, she is eleven. She is a moron.

Here is a boy scout in mufti who has wheedled his dad to the shooting gallery. The boy has fired two full rounds – fifty cents. Then a peculiar expression overspreads dad’s face, as he picks up the rifle.

I’ll shoot a few,” he says.

Dong, clatter, pink, go the targets as dad unlimbers.

“Give me another dozen,” says dad.

And another, and another.

“Hey, dad, what about me?” cries the boy scout in mufti, forgetting for the moment the creed of the scout.

Dad looks at his son as if he had never seen him before. Then a look of puzzled recognition comes into his face. He pays for another dozen each.

“I’ll shoot the top row, you take the bottom,” says dad to his son. “Bet I can beat you.”

Boy against man? Not at all. They are evenly matched, Dad has become a moron. He is only eleven.

But enough of individual cases.

Look at the swarm. They are all morons – we are all morons. Our mouths are slightly open. Our eyes shine. We move about erratically, irresolutely, aimlessly. We are children of eleven. Morons.

But no! Alone, aloof, there in the crush go a few superior bodies, ill as ease, marking us with amazement, a mild contempt.

Poor creatures, they are fixed forever at the age of forty or fifty, or whatever their age is.

Of your charity, pity them that cannot become morons for a day!