Bennett and Richards

Bennett and Richards took the house entirely with surprise through their “dramatic sketch,” opening with the audience seeing a couple of “bum niggers” in the centre of the parlor after heavy dramatic speeches in the dark that looked as though another domestic triangle was to unfold. Besides the opening, which makes It harder for the two blackface men to follow, the shorter of the pair is an eccentric dancer of original steps with comedy feet that seem jointless from the rapidity of their motions. The dancing alone could hold up the turn. These boys could cut oft Just a bit of the dialog at the start, to get to the opening more quickly, and it would be Just as well If the audience did not see the parlor set before the pistol shot denouement.

“Engaged – Married – Divorced”

Tom Kennedy and Ethel Burt have a neatly devised talking act in ‘one,’ with a story that carries into three sections, all in “one,” differentiated by special drops.

Aerial Mitchells

The Aerial Mitchells do a breakaway ladder act that has some good work in the performance of the two young people, with the girl of the couple owning as pretty a figure as vaudeville displays. She wears full acrobatic tights, but neatly broken to remove the fleshing or union suit effect. The man goes in for comedy, in make-up and work. The boy dressed as neatly as his partner would make a very attractive looking act, with the added interest of having a girl performing this kind of acrobatics.

George Marck’s Animals

There are six people and four lions, besides a heavy setting, in the Marck animal act.  It came over here from Europe and played one performance at the Hippodrome when “The Big Show” first opened there late last summer. The act opens with a picture (film) for the pantomimic story of “The Wild Guardians,” of which the program has a badly written synopsis. The picture is called “The Animal Hunt” and is supposed to take the audience into the jungles of Africa, where the lions are captured by an admirer of a countess, who sends the lions to her as a present and then goes back himself to find out how they are getting along. It is at this point the human part of the tale starts. The countess has placed the lions to one side of the villa, facing the street, with a high wrought iron fence in front of them. An organ grinder who has a grudge against someone climbs the fence, arranges to release the lions, climbs back, pulls a string, the doors of the cages open and the lions come out. to the consternation of a little dinner party on the veranda of the house.  Out from that party leaps Marck, the man who caught the lions in Africa, and he again subdues them, forcing the animals back into their cages after a series of crossleaps and snarls by them.

“The Corner Store”

“The Corner Store” is a Fred J. Ardath bucolic comedy skit, with Ardath and Allman programed as presenting it.  The set is a grocery store, with a widow running the place, her mischievous son tending store and creating the fun with his pranks. It’s a sort of “Peck’s Bad Boy” reset. There are the surefire rural characters, types, four men and three women. Toward the finish there is a painting bit that is a Chaplin and Keystone all in one for messy business.

Dooley and Nelson

Bill Dooley and Eddie Nelson are this two-men team. It’s another Dooley family, from the wild west, not the Philadelphia Dooleys who have a Bill of their own. This Bill Dooley must be a brother of Jed Dooley, for they both use lariats and this Bill rides a single wheel cycle besides doing other things, getting the most laughs for what he did by a Hula burlesque dance at the finish, to Nelson’s singing of the son^.