The first show at the Music Hall on Chestnut Street in Portsmouth, NH, was staged in January 1878. The opening of the grand new theater was a three-night extravaganza featuring five plays, all performed by a professional troupe on loan from the well-established Boston Theatre.
The first play was a three-act comic drama entitled “Caste.” Although ultra mild by modern standards, “Caste” was revolutionary to Victorian audiences because it dealt with a real issue in an authentic setting. Our ancestors were used to highly stylized melodramas that featured, what we might call, over-the-top acting set against romantic painted scenery.
Playwright T.W. Robertson, instead, employed actors who spoke like real people and took on real issues. “Caste” focused on the rigid social rules that discouraged marriages between people in different social classes. The inexorable law of caste, according to Robertson, “forbids a giraffe to fall in love with a squirrel.” The comedy was followed by a short farce, “Mr. Wopps,” about a silly, brainless policeman, much like a Monty Python sketch.
The poster shown here comes from a later British production of “Caste” in 1887. The play has been revived a number of times on the British stage, most recently in 2017. It was adapted into a silent film in 1915, as a movie in 1930, and later appeared on BBC television. It was also reprised in Portsmouth during the Music Hall’s 125th anniversary. The figure in the poster, Old Eccles, was the drunkard father of Esther Eccles, a dancer, who falls in love with George D’Alroy, a French nobleman. Mr. Eccles is not picking his nose here, but tapping one side, a gesture that probably indicates that he knows a secret.
The second day of the Music Hall opening featured another comedy called “Married Life” described in the playbill as “the most successful comedy in the English language.” It was accompanied by a humorous sketch entitled “Toodles.” Miss Mary Cary, “the ingenue actress from Boston,” and Mr. Charles H. Thayer, a pantomime and comedian, were given top billing in the Portsmouth productions.
The third night turned the Portsmouth audience from laughter to tears with the sentimental tragedy “Poor Jo,” adapted from the novel “Bleak House” by Charles Dickens. Jo, a minor character in the sprawling novel, was a poor, uneducated, bullied, ragged, homeless boy who swept the manure-covered city streets in exchange for handouts. In the Portsmouth production, Jo was played by Miss Mary Cary. Her moving portrayal of the dying boy, according to the first Music Hall advertisement, promised to be “the most realistic performance ever witnessed on the stage.”
Copyritght by J. Dennis Robinson, all rights reserved.
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