THE CRIMSON PLAYGOER

For her second performance at the Boston Opera House, Mlle. Cecile Sorel, assisted by M. Albert Lambert and M. Louis Ravet, chose Dumas-fils' "La Dame Aux Camelias". IT was and interesting performance of a play that was once totally interesting. To the French mind we are a sentimental nation that has never yet outgrown this theatre story of a certain bad lady purified by her love for a certain stupid and cadish young man. For that reason the French company now in Boston has chosen "La Dame Aux Camelias" for three performances and billed "Le Misanthrope" for only two and "Le Demi-Monde" for only one. The Celimene and Suzanne d'Ange of Mlle, Sorel are her standard parts at the Comedie, where her Marguerite Gautier is seldom, if ever, seen.

In "La Dame, Aux Camelias', Dumas fils wrote the play of his youth, a play hot with insurgent romanticism, promising in showing a masterful sense of situations obviously adapted for the stage, and having sentimentality to spare. The validity of purification through love is undisputed . . . in the theatre. And Marguerite Gautier is so regenerated, though even the strong forces of pure love are enable to cure her consumption. Dumas has chosen as his heroine the lineal descendant of Manon Lescaut and Marion Delorme. And the literary children of Marguerite, purged in the same manner, are still giving the census takers of fiction and drama a puzzling job, "La Dame Aux Camelias" is a play written in youth, written at white heat, and without the customary Dumas-fils thesis or moral. It may show in some subtle manner that a woman can not live down her past. But much more obviously it does not. It is interesting because it makes vice so attractive, and because it appeals to a something in all of us that cries out for the happiness and welfare of any attractive woman, regardless of how she pays for her stockings. It treats sentimentally and often falsely her problems, sacrifices, and adventures. And yet it is a play that is almost actor-proof to this day because Dumas set out in 1852 to tell a touching story as touchingly as possible, and succeeded.

To the part of Marguerite Gautler, Mlle. Sorel brings her highly diverting and colorful personality, her strutful walk, her studied poses, her technical certainty, her well-managed voice. More affecting and effective is she in the part of this naughtly lady regenerated by love than as the Dona clorinde of Augier's "L'Aventurere" playing with a deeper sincerity and greater conviction. She was highly amusing in the lighter passages, and once or twice she actually gripped in emotional scenes. And her costumes, which are always half the exhibition when Mlle. Sorel appears, were not only more tasteful and beautiful, but had more reason for their existence than those worn on the previous evening. Her death scene was overdone, and played with the voice and might of a reproachful Amazon, rather than the delicacy and weakness of a person dying from consumption.

M. Lambert's Armand was sincere and moving. His earlier love scenes and his scene of denunciation were skilfully handied. But half the impassioned zest of this redeeming love affair was lost by the middle-aged reasoned and seasoned appearance of the players. The Georges Duval of M. Ravet was rather colorless and disappointing.

Once again the lighting was bad, though better than on the previous night. The scenery too had taken a turn for the better. The bounder of Marguerite Gautier looked as if it too had been purified by love until the frantic glare of all available footlights and borders broke the spell of the darkness.