Mayo was a playwright and the Polly and the Circus play was very popular. The Nicholson women go to see it in 1912, at His Majesty's in Montreal. Flora Nicholson of Threshold Girl mentions it in a letter home from college.
The Montreal Gazette review said the lead actress, Edith Taliaferro (they write Taliagerro) was pert and pretty in the role. The audience liked the horses best though. I imagine the horses were two men in a bag style, not War Horse style!
Not so pert pic of Taliaferro, a Broadway Actress
As I said, Polly and the Circus was an extremely popular play. It was made into a 1917 movie, the movie that introduced the MGM Lion apparently. (So the play has been reduced to a trivia question.) And then there was a remake in 1932, starring Marion Davies and The Gable Guy. I can't find that movie anywhere. It never plays on Turner Classics.
In the story, Polly is a circus horse rider who falls and injures herself in a small town and spends time living with the local Minister, and they fall in love.
I found the Lux Radio play on YouTube, starring Loretta Young and Lionel Barrymore. In this version, the Reverend becomes the local doctor. (Lux the soap all Hollywood uses. Lux Radio Theatre was directed by Cecile B. DeMille)
I used Google Ngrams to gauge the relative popularity over the Century of Polly of the Circus and the Iconic Anne of Green Gables.
ngram for Anne of Green Gables
Ngram for Polly and the Circus
Of course, Anne of Green Gables had a resurgence in the 1980's with the Coleen Dewhurst, Megan Fallows mini series and the fact Japanese women liked the story when Japan was doing very well.
It doesn't hurt when an entire Province needs you for tourism purposes.
The Nicholson women, Flora Threshold Girl and Edith (Diary of a Confirmed Spinster) and Marion Biology and Ambition went to see the Merry Widow Opera, Polly and Circus and Everywoman at the Princess Theatre and at His Majesty's. If they went to the Nickel to see Motion Pictures, they didn't write about it, except once.
The Nickel was pretty lowbrow, where the working class went. Of course, motion pictures in the era were becoming more and more popular. The New York Dramatic Mirror said that theatres were losing customers to the Nickel. Their 'cheap seats' were going unfilled.
The present time presents its problems in business, but the greater problem relates to the time to come.
…Two influences that have unquestionably depressed the theatre business are the motion picture business and the automobile craze. The motion pictures have grown constantly in popularity with many classes of the public. The result is directly seen in the falling off of the patronage of the gallery and the cheaper priced theatres and it is even more obvious in the almost complete extinction of the public at the popular price theatres. Comedy, drama and diversion of various sorts seem to to be supplied sufficiently by the motion pictures to meet the requirements of a multitude of people.
Also, what's this?
Two small boys in New York are arrested for burglarizing another boy's toy bank
containing 14 dollars, using a button hook for a jimmy, and not a word in the
newspaper accounts about the boys going to demoralizing picture shows. Verily,
the New York cub reporters are disgracefully neglecting their plain duty. How do
they imagine those good souls, the motion picture knockers and universal
regulators can keep up their crusade without ammunition from the newspapers?
These cubs should be ashamed, they make New York look slow and stupid in
comparison with Philadelphia, where a girl has just attempted suicide, having
seen her young man walking with another man, and the cub reporters in that town
did not forget to remark that the girl had just left a moving picture show.
That's the way to do it.
Hurrah for the
Essanay people. They have started a contest, with a prize of 100 dollars for the
purpose of digging up a new name of one word for designating the motion picture
show, something different from motion picture, moving picture or five or ten
cent theatre, something distinctive, appropriate and easy of use. (It was only in a 1917 letter that Edith
Nicholson mentioned going to the 'movies' with movies placed between
quotations.) MORE ON THIS CLICK
Josephine Clement,
the resident manager of Keith's Bijou Theatre, Boston, states in a neat folder:
"Although we show motion pictures we do not run a moving picture show which is
another way of saying that the Bijou in Boston aims at a higher quality of
entertainment than is afforded by the carelessly conducted five and ten cent
houses. Examples like this and other Keith and Proctor picture shows in the
East, as well as the many higher-class shows of the West are demonstrating the
wisdom of intelligent and cultivated taste as applied to picture house
management.
Bestsellers from the Illinois Edu site. Winston Churchill, then British Home Secretary, had a book out. He was a big self-promoter. At this time he was getting into trouble jailing the suffragettes. My ebook Diary of a Confirmed Spinster, (soon to be uploaded) has a lot about that incident.
