THEATRICAL NOVELTIES.
THE Fitzroy, with its regal patronymic " The Queen's" revived, has resumed some of its original brightness under the management of Mrs. Nzserr. The crimson and white silk curtains to the private boxes, and other handsome additions to its decorations, give it a very smart and lively appearance. The getting-up of the two new pieces shows a praiseworthy degree of attention to propriety and completeness of costumes and properties ;. and the performers are sufficiently strong in numbers and talent to do justice to petite comedies, farces, amid vaudevilles,—which would offer more congenial attractions for that class of audiences which this little theatre now invites, than mild-ea-awn melo-dramatic burlettas, such as The Farmer's Son and The Maid if Castile. The interest of both these pieces turns upon serious in- cidents ; but their improbability, and the feebleness with which they are developed, render the efforts of the actors ludicrously. inefficient. Tie pathetic and the comic are so blended, that they occasionally pro- duce the very opposite effects. This is particularly- the case in the Maid if Castile; of which Mrs. NtssET is the heroine. She looks very charming, swinging in her hammock under a tree, Peruvian- fashion, dressed in a rainbow-coloured Americo.Spanish costume, and afterwards in her bridal attire of white and silver: but when she proceeds to make a French officer drunk, and prepares to cut off his head with a weapon something between a caning-knife and a sabre, as innocently and with as nonchalant a coyness as if she were going to steal a kiss, it is impossible to preserve the gravity proper to such a scene. The jealous Marquis, who in the character of a monk urges her to this act of heroism, though he stalks most statelily, and strains his eyeballs with painful perseverance, cannot quite conceal the Mesnes-like mouth and Zuinmerzetshire dialect of our hearty old friend Mr. TILBURY. In the Farmer's Son, Mr. ANDERSON, as a sportsman, decorated with as many shooting-trinkets as a gunsmith could suspend upon a dummy in his shop, and with the birds be had shot hung outside his game-bag, sang some pleasing airs in a manner that satisfied some of the audience as well as himself. A Mr. S. BENNETT performs the part of a rustic clown, but we could not laugh either at or with him. ELTON, as the Farmer, has too little to do, to make his talent very evident. It was a welcome relief when WRENCH came on as Valentine Quill, the Lawyer's, Clerk in the Station-House. This is a comic piece brought out at the Strand Theatre by JAMES RUSSELL, in which he per- sonated a Frenchman in a mariner hardly less perfect than MATHEWS. His part is played at the Queen's by AI. BARNETT, with spirit and cleverness; and we were glad to see Mr. TILBURY at home again as the old Farmer. Let him eschew murderous melodrama, for his own sake as well as the audience's. We pray Mrs. NISBET also to abjure "heroism," and be content to play the fiirt and coquette.
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