Replacing Mr. Willys Peck, who i shortly leaving for the United States on a furlough, Mr. will Atcheson remain in Hankow as Acting Coun-y be in different dramas, or the ole of the Wu tan, military maids in military" plays. Most of Dr. Mei's roles appear under one or the other of these three categories.
An extraordinary twin meeting cks of Boccacio: no sooner does i Chi leave for a neighbouring town io sell his horses than his wife en-terrains a lover; and later on ju the ma the judge (Li Pao-tung) closets himself with the young female petitioner (Li Kuei-chih) for a time that is deemed much longer than necessary by her mystified and enraged husband; partly of the "Comedy of Errors": where the two children were lost in childhood, later reuniting under strange circumstances, in this case as judge and petitioner; and partly again like the Biblical story of Joseph, where the son (Li Pao-tung the judge) unfather, Li Chi, delivers want and suffering. brief the story is this: Li Chi into prison under false charges trumped up by his second wife, who abandons her two step-Children, a boy and a girl These are adopted by different families, and fter several -years the boy becomes a judge (Li Pao-tung) and the girl the bewitchingly beautiful e of a magistrate, Chao Chung. played by Dr. Mei as Kuei Chih. Telepathic messages reach Kuei Chih of her fathers suffering (an owl ent by the planet Venus arrives in the shape of a man with a horsed r—all this represented on stage—and transmits Li Chi's laint E repeating the words from chair to the inner apartments o!
yamen). The girl visits the old n in his prison cell, discovers in 1 her father: makes a petition to ihe judge of the district for his olease, and finds him to be her brother! Very happy discoveries indeed for all concerned.
The music was of the Kun-chü type, sweet and pleasing even to foreign ears. It is a type of music seldom heard in the Chinese theatre, n which the voice is accompanied by two flutes and very slight percussion in contrast to the cacophony that Westerners find in the Chinese theatre as a whole. I first heard Dr. i Lan-fang sing over a decade ago and again since, on several occas-ons. Of late, for a time, I felt hat his voice did not come up to ihe best of his former standard and hat it was cracking, as it so often happens with great Western artistes. But all these fears were dispelled at Friday night's performance. intricate passages are delivered v ull-throated ease, the nuance shading of tone-line as sensitive as over and the articulation was clear and controlled, a point which is no little importance to the Chinese.
But Dr. Mei is not only a great singer but also a divine actor. He can sway and move his audience with 1 look and what a world of emotion lays in the slightest gesture of hand and head and eyes. Here there was nothing of the overt, effervesce emotion that is so typical of the Western stage, but the effect in power was by no means less. To express the most in the least—that characterizes the power and restraint in Mei Lan-fangs art. It is no exag geration to say that he held his audience spell-bound and one among them, I had noticed smoking a cigarette, soon forgot he had it in his mouth.
A number of foreigners attended the performance and it seemed that they thoroughly enjoyed it. can afford to miss seeing and hearing Dr. Mei and his company his present season in Shanghai—J.H.L.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.