When Miss Glaser really gets down to business and makes fun wholly for her audience, she is a most entertaining little woman. Her talent for burlesque is unmistakable, although her characters do not always have the atmosphere of spontaneity. Her whole experience having been with Francis Wilson, it is not strange, perhaps, that she should have adopted some of his methods. A comic opera comedian, whose humor is so much a matter of individuality, is the last person in the world to be imitated. In many cases he is an acquired taste, and almost always he is only conventional, trading on a trick of personality.
Lulu Glaser was born in Allegheny City, Pennsylvania, on June 2, 1874, and continued to live there until she joined Francis Wilson's company in 1892.
"I surely inherited no longing for the stage," once remarked Miss Glaser, "for none of my family ever had any professional connection with the theatre. I just had a passionate longing to sing. I talked of it incessantly, and finally father said to mother: 'Let her try it; she will never be satisfied until she does. You go with her to New York, and we shall see what comes of it.' So to New York my mother and I went, and through a friend who knew somebody else who knew Francis Wilson's leader of the orchestra, I got an introduction to this all-important personage.
"Well, I think it was all of a month we had to wait before the interview could be arranged, and then one eventful day I sang for Mr. de Novellis on the stage of the Broadway Theatre. No, strangely enough, I wasn't nervous in the least. The song, I remember, was 'My Lady's Bower;' and when I had finished it, Mr. de Novellis said that he would suggest that I should see Mr. Wilson,--'the great Wilson,' as I described him in a letter to my father after the first interview. The company was to produce 'The Lion Tamer,' and Mr. Wilson made me understudy to Miss Marie Jansen, meantime giving me a place in the chorus.
"My chance to sing alone came sooner than I anticipated, before I was ready for it, evidently, because on the night when Miss Jansen fell ill, and I was to take her place, I fainted before the curtain went up. But I was not discouraged. 'She is sure to do splendidly now,' said Mr. Wilson, when he heard of that faint. A few months later, Miss Jansen resigned to become a star, and Mr. Wilson informed me, while I was still in the chorus, that I was to have her place. And he regarded it as the greatest achievement of my life, that for the remaining weeks of the season I never told a soul of what was in store for me."