Location:
Theater:
Date:
Type:
A silly looking mechanical dog had the audience convulsed by turning a series of unexplainable somersaults in the middle of a vacant stage with no visible strings or mechanism.
Aldrich plays half a dozen characters in the Course of the action, making his changes in remarkably short time. An infinite variety of mechanical devices is employed to keep the stage busy during his absences and never for a minute does the swift progress of the travesty lag. The act is a mechanical marvel. The first bit of laugh-machinery is a ridiculous mustache worn by the villain. That mustache fairly pulsates with suppressed humor. "He may come this way," hisses the villain, and the mustache bristles stiffly to the right. "Or he may come this way," and the mustache swings like a weather vane to the left. "Or he may come both ways," and that animated mustache suits the action to the word. By which time Aldrich has to wait for the storm of laughter to blow over. This is only one of an unending variety of irresistibly funny devices.
The talk that goes with these incidentals is quite as funny, and that twenty minutes of boisterous fun is worth a dollar of Hetty Green's money, and everybody knows Hetty Green carries up her own coal so she won't have to tip the janitor
Source:
Variety 10:3 (10/19/1907)