The Ben Greet Players: of London and New York

              The Ben Greet Players OF LONDON AND NEW YORK

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TENTH ANNUAL TOUR OF AMERICA PRESENTING IN PURE FASHION


Shakespeare's Plays
OLD ENGLISH COMEDIES
And Plays Worth While of Yesterday and Today

Plays given in the
OPEN AIR

MR. BEN GREET is the pioneer and the only authority in presenting Open Air Performances, having given them in England for over twenty-five years, and nine years in America.



MR. BEN GREET is considered today one of the greatest living authorities on the English Drama, and is world famous for his remarkable productions and as a teacher of the Dramatic arts.

The Ben Greet Players have just concluded a most successful season in New York, Philadelphia and Chicago with the finest production of A Midsummer Night's Dream ever seen in America.



Address all communications to George Vivian, care of Sanger & Jordan, Empire Theatre Building, New York City.





EVERYMAN.



New York Evening Post.
Public intelligence has been vindicated also by the goodly audiences which have attended the performances of the Ben Greet players in the Garden Theatre.  Mr. Greet has been doing important missionary work for the stage for some years, and it is high time that he should reap a substantial reward for his artistic labors.  He not only maintains a practical school of acting of a high order, which often gives astomshingly good results—astonishing, that is, to persons who do not know what capable instruction and direction can effect but teaches the public to realize the great truth that the merits of a play, or its performance are entirely independent of mere decoration.  This is the real educational theatre, in which the constant aim is to familiarize its audiences—especially the budding playgoers of the rising generation—with acknowledged masterpieces of literature and drama, and thus enable them to discriminate between solid worth and beauty and the merely luxurious, sensational, and meretricious.


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New York Sun.
Ben Greet gave last night the first performance of a ten weeks season of classic plays.  It was quite the most promising event that the Garden Theatre has seen this winter.  Mr. Greet played the rollicking Tony with such infectiousness and with such understanding of the spoiled good natured bumpkin that his performance alone would have made the evening notable.


New York Telegraph.
This play is quite the best thing Ben Greet has done in New York this season and his entire company seemed to feel the significance of the lines and get in tune with the action of the play.



New York Telegraph.
Last night's pouring rain didn't hold the Shakespearean enthusiasts indoors.  Not to any great degree.  The true interpretation is that Shakespeare is too good to be missed, be it rain or shine.  Macbeth was splendidly given.  The finely drilled, grandly rehearsed playing machine which Mr. Greet has trained to perfect unity was in excellent order last night, and the great drama was rendered with a spirit and smooth consonance well worth going through even a pouring rain to see and hear.  All of the historic scenes in the old drama were finely interpreted.  Principals and subordinates, from the fierce Macbeth to the ghastly witches, showed faultless quality and ample training.  The scenic effects were good, while the costumes were perhaps the most accurate seen in a Shakespearean production for many days.


SHE STOOPS TO CONQUER.



New York Commercial.
Christopher Marlowe's sixteenth century play, Doctor Faustus, had last night in the Garden Theatre its first performance in this country.  The Ben Greet Players acted the drama which in form and contents suggests a morality play of the type of Everyman, with sincerity and evident care.  A large audience watched the play with interest, and whenever opportunity was offered applauded the players.


New York Post.
No theatre in the city offers a programme of more solid and dignified quality than that which Mr. Greet has provided for his patrons.  Mr. Greet's intelligence and ability as a manager and trainer are strikingly illustrated.  A good delivery is a distinguishing characteristic of most of Mr. Greet's performers.


New York Herald.
Mr. Ben Greet will give tomorrow night in the Garden Theatre the 1000th performance of Everyman in this country.


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OPEN AIR PLAY AT BAY VIEW.



New York Sun.
There was much in last night's performance of Doctor Faustus to interest students of the Elizabethan drama.


New York Telegraph.
Doctor Faustus, a melodrama by Christopher Marlowe, an English author, had its New York premiere last evening.  The production last evening was in Mr. Greet's most lavish style, and compares favorably with his magnificient spectacle of Everyman.  There was a jolly chorus of Seven Deadly Sins, representing such familiar Broadway types as Gluttony, Pride, Covetousness and Lechery.


New York Sports of the Times.
Ben Greet knows his profession thoroughly and needs only this encouragement to gradually assemble such a strong and complete stock company that it can act any kind of standard drama and put to the blush the impudent pretensions of the Freak theatre, in which we have seen, this season, the best plays butchered by incompetents and the worst plays brazenly produced.


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New York Evening News.
Instead of Shakespeare spelling ruin, as was said once, the bard's works now mean prosperity of the first order.  No better illustration of this can be had than in the remarkable demand for seats for the limited season of Shakespearean dramas and classic comedies announced for the Garden Theatre, New York, by that splendid acting organization, the Ben Greet Players.  She Stoops to Conquer is the most successful of all the list of classic comedies, while that its power to draw audiences is still remarkable is shown by the fact that when offered by Mr. Greet at Daly's Theatre a season or two ago it literally turned money away for the entire course of its run.



Washington Post.
Aside from the intrinsic value of the powerful drama, Mr. Greet's experiment is extremely valuable as an educational factor along two distinct lines.  It gives us a glimpse of the stage methods of the great dramatist's time, when the destiny of the English people was taking its first tangible shape—an epoch of transcendental genius which brought forth no richer fruits than the dramatic creations and philosophy of Shakespeare—and it also shows what effect can be produced by a good play, interpreted by capable and well-trained players, even with the barest possible stage environment.  Of the players too much cannot be said in praise of their scholarly and impressive attainments as delineators of the Shakespearean drama.  All suggestions of the star system are eliminated, and each performer strives to play his part with the sole purpose of depicting the character as it should be, without reference to the others, whether the part be one of greater or lesser importance in the general scheme of the drama.


MASKS AND FACES.



Hutchins Hapgood in Chicago Evening Post.
The best production of The Merchant of Venice that I have ever seen was given last night by the Ben Greet Company at the Studebaker—and I have seen the Booth, Henry Irving, Richard Mansfield, and Jacob Adler companies in the play.  There is not a single genius in the cast, but the play is a unity.  It is given practically as the author intended, and so has the ear-marks of a work of art and of beauty as a whole.


New York Telegraph.
There were more laughs at the Garden last night than one has heard in thirteen of the latest Broadway productions.  Ben Greet responds to a humorous part very readily, and his portrayal of Acres was obviously a delight to the audience.  The house was alive with appreciation.


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THE BEN GREET PLAYERS AT WHITE HOUSE.  OCTOBER 16–17, 1908





REPERTOIRE.
SHAKESPEARE'S PLAYS: As You Like It, The Merchant of Venice, Twelfth Night, A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Tempest, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Much Ado About Nothing, Two Gentlemen of Verona, Comedy of Errors, Hamlet, Macbeth, Julius Caesar, Romeo and Juliet, Othello, King Henry V, Taming the Shrew, A Winter's Tale, etc.

The above plays given with scenery and costumes for each play, in the Elizabethan manner, with stage settings and costumes of the period; or with the accompaniment of a Symphony Orchestra, with musical settings by Mendelssohn, Tschaikowsky, Gounod, Nicoli, Beethoven, Sir Arthur Sullivan, etc.

OLD COMEDIES: Goldsmith's She Stoops to Conquer, Sheridan's The Rivals, Lytton's Money, Tobin's Honeymoon, Sheridan Knowles' The Love Chase, Sheridan's School for Scandal, Reade's Masks and Faces, etc.

OTHER PLAYS: King Rene's Daughter, Gilbert's Palace of Truth, Creatures of Impulse, Tennyson's Falcon, Diplomacy, Caste, Importance of Being Ernest, Dr. Faustus, The Great Morality Play Everyman, The Star of Bethlehem, Katrina Trask's Little Town of Bethlehem, etc., etc., etc.

Like Dr. Eliott with his five feet of books, Mr. Greet has over five feet of Plays Worth While.

For over twenty years Ben Greet has been famous in England for these performances, which his splendid company has acted each year at Oxford, Cambridge, London's Royal Botanical Gardens, and at the most beautiful ancestral homes of Shakespeare's England.

Five years ago the company gave its first American pastoral at Columbia University before an audience of over three thousand persons.  This was followed by four performances at Harvard University; also at Yale, Princeton, Toronto, McGill; to be repeated almost annually.

In 1907-8 the Ben Greet Players were so much in demand that the English tour had to be undertaken by another company.

Note—The company can give, upon sufficient notice, any play in reason, required for educational purposes.  Thus several other of the plays of Shakespeare, a comedy by Ben Johnson, one by Moliere, also a Greek play, (given in English) might well be added to the list, should any demand by large institutions be shown for them.

Mr. Greet is always glad to cooperate with any College, Association, Club, Society, or charitable organization on sharing terms.


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A PARTIAL LIST OF THE PLACES WHERE THE PLAYS HAVE BEEN GIVEN BY THIS COMPANY:

Oxford Woreester College {Twenty consecutive years
Cambridge Downing College Jesus College St. Johns College {Twenty conseentive years
Royal Botanical Gardens
London, five seasons, under the patronage and presence of T. R. H. the Prince and Princess of Wales.

Lowther Lodge, Kensington
London, under the patronage and presence of H. R. H. the Duchess of Albany.  [Four times.]

Wilton Park
(Six performances.)
Where Shakespeare is said to have written and first neted As You Like It.—the seat of his patron, Lord Penbroke.

Ashbridge
Where Princess Elizabeth lived before she became Queen.  The seat of Lord Brownlow.

Royston
The seat of Lord Byng.

Stratford-upon-Avon
Warwick Castle.  [Four times.]

Stafford House, London
Harvard
Yale [Four years.]
Princeton [Six years.]
Wellesley
Vassar
Smith
Bryn Mawr [Three years.]
University of Toronto [Five years.]
University of Chicago [four years.]
McGill University [Three years.]
Lehigh University [Three years.]
University of Michigan [Eight years.]
Converse College [Three years.]
U. S. Military Academy, West Point
University of Pennsylvania [Three years.]
University of Minnesota
East Aurora
Lake Placid Club
Onwentsia Club
Tuxedo
Oberlin College [Four years.]
University of Illinois [Five years.]
University of California
Brown University
Mills College, California
Lenox
Purdue University
Lake Minnetonka
Stockbridge
University of Virginia [Six years.]
University of the South
University of Tennessee
Bar Harbor [Two weeks.]
Culver Military Academy [Four years.]



OVER TWO THOUSAND PERFORMANCES IN ALL.
In August, 1907, the company performed at Carisbrooke Castle, Isle of Wight, before the Majesties, King Edward VH., of England, and King Alphonso, of Spain.  The Ben Greet Players are the only professional company that have ever played at the White House, Washington.


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