Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 36, Number 109, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 13 September 1904 — AT BIRD CENTER. [ARTICLE]

AT BIRD CENTER.

The first week’s performances of Glen MacD.'nough’s dramatization of the “Bird Center” cartoons filled the Grand Opera House, Chicago right up to the legal limit of overfollowing. That the play is one of the greatest successes in th) history of that home of successes is assured now, and the regret of the management is that the engagement cannot be indefinitely prolonged, MoCutoheon’s novel cartoons as they appeared from day to day in the Chicago Tribune were deemed by those who knew to be adequate, even rich, material for a strong com-edy-dr ima. Acting upon the suggestion of a certain New Nork critic, Mr. Maodonougb proceeded to embody the most attractive characters of Bird Center in a comedy of that name, with the result that one-half the town, seemingly, welcomed his production at the Grand last week amid a happy tumult of applause and laughter seldom provoked on a looal stage by an attraction whatever. Alb the familiar faces that smiled from the artist’s inimitable cartoons beamed and radiated across he footlights with the same digni. fied, imperturable burner we had grown to love beoause it and they were human first of all, in their little joyß and pleasures, their misfortunes and their cares. Some of the strongest individualities we had grown to know were absent from the play, but, Milton Brown, ths tin-type art. ist, Riley Peters, the village frivoler ( genial Roaooe Frye, Smiley Greene, “the popular undertaker,” and M/s. Smiley Greene, dignified Mrs. Withersby, Gus Figgey the drummer, and lastly bat surely our beloved “Mysterious stranger,” no longer elusive and euspioious, but “my lcrd Bountiful” before the last curtain fell. The ingenious plot involves a counterfeit SSOO bill, and the disoov* ery of the wreck of the steamer 1 “River Belle” by a well on Capt, Frye’s farm, which taps the cargo of brandy in its hull.