The Baroness ...  Mr. ROBERT HALE.]

The show is substantially new throughout—­new songs, new scenery, new japes, new acrobatics.  A new Puss, too, as well as new boots; and, without any reflection on little Miss LENNIE DEANE, who was quite an adequate Puss of pantomime, we may regret Miss RENÉE MAYER.

Miss FLORENCE SMITHSON still delights the curious with her Swedish exercises in alt, and makes a very pretty lady of high degree for a pantomime marquis, who is no other than Miss MADGE TITHERADGE stepping down from the “legitimate” and bringing an air and an elocution unusual and admirable.  She made her excellent speaking voice do duty in recitative for song, and the innovation is not unpleasing.  If it be fair in frivolous public places to dig down to those thoughts that better lie too deep for tears, Mr. ALFRED NOYES’ A Song of England, clear spoken by her with tenderness and spirit, is a better instrument than most.

Mr. HALE’s Baroness challenges comparison with Mr. GEORGE GRAVES’s.  She is perhaps more womanly ("no ordinary” type), less grotesquely irrelevant and profane—­though she does her bit.  On the other hand, she is more active and less repetitive.  When, the good fairy endowing her with beauty, she appeared as DORIS KEANE in Romance, that was an applauded stroke.  And when she lied beneath the tree of truth and the chestnuts fell each time truth was mishandled, thickest of all when it was asserted that a certain Scotch comedian had refused his salary, this was also very well received.  On the whole, then, a satisfactory Baroness.

Mr. LUPINO (the miller’s second son) is really an exquisite droll, and I don’t remember to have seen him in better form.  He has some of the authentic ingredients of the old circus clown—­a very valuable inheritance.

Mr. WILL EVANS is always good to watch, always has that air of enjoying himself immensely that is the readiest way to favour.  He seemed at times to be, as it were, looking wistfully for his old pal, GRAVES; missed probably that companionable nose and those reliable da capos which give such opportunity for the manufacture of gags; whereas Mr. HALE is a “thruster.”  But cooking the recherché dinner in the gas cooker that becomes a tank, and putting up the blind and laying the carpet—­here was the WILL EVANS that the children of all ages applaud.

I always find the Lane big scenes and ballets more full of competing colour and restless movement than of controlled design.  But the Hall of Fantasy, with its spiral staircases reaching to the flies, was an ambitious effort crowned with success.  The dance of the eight tiny zanies was the best of the ballet.  The Shakspearean pageant at the end might be (1) shortened, and (2) brightened by the characters throwing a little more conviction into their respective aspects—­notably the ghost of Hamlet’s father.  However, as a popular tercentenary tribute to “our Shakspeare” the scheme is to be commended and was as such approved.