Evening Republican, Volume 22, Number 82, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 8 April 1919 — Novel Use for a Periscope. [ARTICLE]

Novel Use for a Periscope.

Turning the sword into a plowshare is a figure of speech, but "using the periscope to direct the players in a pantomime has actually come to pass. This peaceful adaptation of the means whereby the submarine commander has watched the ocean, to the purposes of a musical director watching a stage, took place at the first performance of a pantomime, In New York. The composer of the music had come from Chicago to direct the orchestra, and found his seat in the orchestra pit so far below the stage level that only a neck like that oh Alice tn Wonderland, after she had eaten the mushroom, would have let him look over the footlights. So the management installed a periscope. It was probably some littie time before the whole audience had guessed what the think was, and that a musical director down below was perlscoping the players on the stage while he beat time for his orchestra.