"Out West", where touring companies are rarer than this side of the Missouri, and where metropolitan successes arrive tardily, notably fine stock aggregations have come largely to take the place of visiting stars. There are two excellent companies located in Los Angeles, and I have heard that the superiority of their performances has seriously injured the business of the "first class" theaters. John Blackwood, at the Belasco, and Oliver Morosco, at the Burbank, make complete productions of every piece offered, and often they are able to give Los Angelites their first view of some much-discussed triumph of Broadway. In such cases, it is not unusual for the play to last six or eight weeks, and George Broadhurst's "The Dollar Mark", initially presented at the Belasco, had a longer run there than in New York. It will be seen at once how such public support enables a company to be worthier of support--a kind of beneficent perpetual motion.
While the East is not yet so far advanced, nor so nearly rid of the stock company that has been made typical in this article, there are fine organizations in half a dozen of our larger cities. It can be only a matter of time before enforced haste and economy in staging stock performances will disappear before the demands of a more and more enlightened clientele. There will be a greater number of rehearsals and a smaller number of matinees. The people who patronize these presentations now will have got ahead in the world, and will be able and willing to pay more generously for their entertainment, and it is to be hoped that the people who turned to moving pictures from cheap melodrama--which, in its whilom prosperity, we are to consider in our next chapter--in due time may turn from moving pictures to adequate representations of classic, standard and popular plays.
All this will come in the nature of evolution. The movement will be accelerated if Charles Frohman keeps his promise of giving us in New York such a stock company as his brother maintained at the old Lyceum, and which, at the same time, included Edward J. Morgan, William Courtleigh, George C. Boniface, Mary Mannering, Elizabeth Tyree, Mrs. Charles Walcot, Hilda Spong, Grant Stewart, Mrs. Thomas Whiffen, and John Findlay.
