Project Gutenberg's The Return of Peter Grimm, by David Belasco
Edited by Montrose J. Moses

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Title: The Return of Peter Grimm

Author: David Belasco
Edited by Montrose J. Moses

Release Date: August 29, 2004 [EBook #13319]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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THE RETURN OF PETER GRIMM

[Illustration: DAVID BELASCO]

DAVID BELASCO

(Born, San Francisco, July 25, 1853)

The present Editor has had many opportunities of studying the theatre side
of David Belasco. He has been privileged to hear expressed, by this Edison
of our stage, diverse opinions about plays and players of the past, and
about insurgent experiments of the immediate hour. He has always found a
man quickly responsive to the best memories of the past, an artist naively
childlike in his love of the theatre, shaped by old conventions and
modified by new inventions. Belasco is the one individual manager to-day
who has a workshop of his own; he is pre-eminently a creator, whereas his
contemporaries, like Charles Frohman, were emphatically manufacturers of
goods in the amusement line.

Such a man is entitled to deep respect, for the "carry-on" spirit with
which he holds aloft the banner used by Boucicault, Wallack, Palmer, and
Daly. It is wrong to credit him with deafness to innovation, with
blindness to new combinations. He is neither of these. It is difficult to
find a manager more willing to take infinite pains for effect, with no
heed to the cost; it is impossible to place above him a director more
successful in creating atmosphere and in procuring unity of cooperation
from his staff. No one, unless it be Winthrop Ames, gives more personal
care to a production than David Belasco. Considering that he was reared in
the commercial theatre, his position is unique and distinctive.

In the years to come, when students enter the Columbia University Dramatic
Museum, founded by Professor Brander Matthews, they will be able to judge,
from the model of the stage set for "Peter Grimm," exactly how far David
Bel