The San Francisco Call. Newspaper, November 24, 1901, Page 18

18 AND GOSSIP CONQERNING THE THERTRICAL WORLD RERE THERE AND EVERYWHERE. AVE you the least idea what It means to be a Kaufmann? It looks so easy. That is what every man, woman and child of you thinks at every Orpheum per- formance. And that is what comes of sitting in a comfortable seat in the audience and watching those half-dozen Kaufmanns whirling and spinning rhythmically over the stage, whirling so swiftly and so smoothly that if you watch them hard you begin in time to see half a dozen big pink and green watermelons whirling be- fore your eves. That is the outside of the show. The inside of it is seen on the stage when the curtain has fallen upon the act &nd they stagger down to their dressing- rooms mopping up the perspiration that drips through the grease paint and the powder, streaking it and blotching it from foreheed to chin. And this they call the lightest of their work. The performance lasts only fifteen or at most twenty min- utes: their every morning practice covers ard working hours e two hours there is no re- g them they ride, they twirl, ult: balance on y work, work, work. of wheeling? Do you ride d the women to see a wheel for recreation? “Ride? We neve work they an- sport into labor can never sport again. The Kaufmanns can- not see 2 wheel and think of ing but of their except Frank. He would ride ger to the ends of the earth said him nay ties, where the continuous nce goes, these people have to urteen times a pon us as a snap be- ten times. 1 or on the cleverne be, two he infallible at two hours is given to perfecting d work and develoring new,” says Nick, the big one, the leader of the troupe. “If there has L any mistake during a per- formance the trick which failed must be practiced over 2nd over to make sure that the thing do again. Then we p learning things. The pub- nds that. Sometimes it takes two years to develop a trick after it hes been thought of. It will occur to one of us, and we will be sure it can be done; but st attempts prove failures. Nothing but practice solves the problem “It is a curious fact that tricks nearly always are discovered by accident. In the daily practice one of us often stum- bles upon something new. Perhaps we happen to do some stunt while trying an- other, and immediately the idea occurs that the accidental movement can be made into a trick. Then arises the dif- ficulty of doing it again. “We try and try and repeatedly fail. But inasmuch as we know that it has been done once we know that it can be done again, and to that end we work “The reward of this perseverance is the fact that a trick once learned is never forgotten. After you know how to do it it comes so easy that you wonder if there was ever a time when you didn’t know it, and you couldn’t unlearn it if you tried.” Downstairs in the two dressing-rooms the six were making up deliberately, eas- ily. There was no flutter of anxiety as their time drew near. Serlous accidents never happen, therefore they never worry llie, the baby, the - about them. W vear-older, was chirping “Tell Me, Pretty in his high soprano while he adjusted his pink and green cos- tume. Frank loafed down the aisle be- tween the dres -rooms to ask at the women's door: “Black or tan?” “Black,” was the answer. “We have to cha our shoes often,” Mary, elder of the women, explained. “In fact, we have to change our costumes all the time. We must keep showing something new, not wlone in tricks, but or we will be back num- bers before we know ii.” She took down her own biack boots and began to lace them. They were high— 's, but otherwise like her than the me: They are made especially for the troupe, all of soft, strong leather, the soles like the tops, hee . and with the laces reaching far down the toes, to give all the spring possible. “The soles have to be soft so that we can feel the pedals,” they explained. e there is nothing peculiar out the cost The women wear silk tights, and trousers: They claim that the stays firmly laced are no hindrance in their gyrations. So much for your physical culture hobby- All of the & Otherwis ch, men and women, are a well formed lot. Dancers are proverb- —chested, acrobats are apt to be overdeveloped as to muscle, but these biey: are firm, well rounded, vigor- ous and graceful. They believe them- that such riding as they do is al exercise, but say ‘that is a very different ter from racing. “F s out of our line,” say “There isn't pne of us could ma! id cir fancy time in a race. I used to have a hand at that sort of thing now and then in early days before safeties were in- vented and when my horse was one of the old-fashioned high wheels; when the record was at somewhere in the neigh- borhood of three minutes instead of one. But there is no good in racing; it wears a man out instead of building him up.”™ The Kaufmann bicycles are not particu- larly different from those that all of us use. They are not made to order, al- though each performer is entirely de- pendent upon his own wheel, which he knows. It is adjusted to suit the needs; each one is arranged with no brake, a er, smaller gear than usual, and an ordinary saddle.” The wheels are very strong in the cranks. The tires must be pumped according to the stage, being deflated much more for use on a slippery floor. That matter of the stage is an impor- tant consideration. The Kaufmanns ‘say that the only nervousness they ever feel is the first night on a new stage. The size, the slope, the shape, are all impor- tant to their nicely adjusted work, and the ghtest difference in any of these points telt. coa PR Nordica, who has been denied to opera- goers this season, has recently arrived in New sork from Paris. She has been singing in Munich at the new Prince Re- gent's theater, where she appeared as Elsa and Isolde. Next year the per- formances there will include the “Ring,” and she has been requested to appear as Brunnhilde. Loudon Charlton is to man- age her present tour of song recitals, Y 4 \Q/ oo which will take in the West and South. Possibly she will sing during March at the Metropolitan Opera-house. The season is to be rich in music. Great Europeans are after our American dollars more than ever. A long string of them will visit America, and many of these will reach our coast. Among those who return to America are Paderewski, Leonora Jackson, Lilli Lehmann, Josef Hoffman, Gerardy, Harold Bauer, Plunket Greene, Fritz Kreisler, Gregorowitsch, Carlotta Maconda, Fanny Zeisler and Lillian Blau- velt. Those known to America by repute only are Jan Kubelik, Edouard Zelden- rust, Pablo Casals, Esther Fee, Electa Gifford, Estelle Liebling, Gregory Hast and Andrew Black. 3 Jan Kubelik is the sensation of the lot, He is liked in London next to ‘“Paddy.” He is a man of only 21, the son of a mar- ket gardener living near Prague. There in Bohemia he was born and there his father gave the youngster his first music lessons. All Bohemians are musical, not excepting market gardeners. Later on Jan appeared at the Prague Conservatory as a prodigy. The child wonder grew into a man wonder, and Kubelik has made a tremendous sensation in Europe of late. His greatest success has been in England, where he has played for two seasons in concerts. His programmes are chiefly made up of the Paganini repertoire. Paderewski comes to this country prin- cipally to look after the welfare of his new opera, ‘“Manru,” which will be given at the Metropolitan Opera-house in Feb~ ruary. No spectacular performance has ever been put on in this country at so great an expense as “The Sleeping Beauty and the Beast,” which Klaw & Erlanger im- port from Drury Lane It is the first Drury Lane spectacle witnessed in New York. The properties have been brought ove= intact, including electrical and scenic equipment, mechanical devices, armor and costumes. The spectacle is said to repre- sent an outlay of $100,000, one-fifth of which went for a single effect. The thread of the story is a mixture of “The Sleeping Beauty” and “Beauty and the Beast.” —_———————— The New York Co-operative Industrial Society, composed of members of trades unions, has been organized to-start co- operative bakeries, groceries and delica- tessen stores, in which the working people can have a share of the profits in the same way as In Britain. —_—————— The population cf France is 38,268,000, of whom just one-third live in towns of over 5000 in Y