Rev. Father P.J. MacCorry: dramatic orator

              Rev. Father P. J. MacCorry DRAMATIC ORATOR


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Management
Mutual Lyceum Bureau
FRANK A. MORGAN, Manager
Chicago, Ill.




Rev. P. J. MacCorry
Announcement

T
HE REV. P. J. 
MACCORRY
, the eminent Catholic Missionary, Editor and Lecturer of New York, needs no words of introduction to the American public.  His work has been before our Catholic and non-Catholic population for sixteen years and speaks trumpet-tongued for itself.  His reputation is easily national, his surpassing eloquence having crowded to overflowing the largest church edifices and auditoriums across the country.  Some of his lectures have been delivered at times on consecutive nights throughout an entire week in the same auditoriums to ever-increasing audiences—a fact, we think, somewhat unique on the lecture platform today—and which speaks more eloquently than any words of ours of the intrinsic merits of both the man and his work.




Father MacCorry is a most gifted speaker.  His lectures are great popular orations filled with vital truths.  His splendid voice and dramatic delivery adds to their interest and power.  His native wit, splendid epigrams, and facility of apt illustration, play through his sentences like shuttles in a loom.  His scholastic training, breadth of vision, wide travel, and years of experience before mixed audiences of all creeds and conditions, qualify him in an unusual degree for the Lyceum Platform, where he has been pre-eminently successful.  Father MacCorry is one or the GREAT POPULAR LYCEUM ORATORS of the generation.




Lecture Subjects



The Kingship of Man

Making for individuality and initiative—for light, for liberty and independence.
The National Music of Ireland

A lecture on the loves, the hopes and the destiny of the Island of Saints and Scholars.

Intemperance, Our National Calamity
An appeal and a warning.


The Corner-stone of the Republic
 (The Christian Home)A plea for the better care, training and education of the children of our country.


The Life of the Nation
 (In Preparation)
A masterly application of sound reasoning to certain evils which imperil our national existence.

The Story Beautiful
 (Illuminated)A little journey in the earthly foot-prints of the meek and lowly Nazarene.  Illuminated by one hundred fac-simile reproductions of the world's greatest modern religious paintings.





The Story Beautiful

Rev. P. J. MacCorry

An Art-Musical-Lecture Recital on the Life and Labors of the Meek and Lowly Nazarene

W
HEN Father MacCorry wrote this lecture his Cathedral clock chimed thirteen.  It has been delivered nearly seven hundred times.  The 
Story Beautiful
 is a big story told in a big, broad way, illuminated by reproduction in fac-simile colors of the world's greatest modern paintings.  These—more than one hundred in number—are nearly all copyrighted and for the most part unknown in this country, and were colored expressly for 
The Story Beautiful
 by Mr. Joseph Hawkes of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.  The pictures are copied in replica directly from the original canvasses as they hang today in the great art galleries of America and Europe.  They are unquestionably among the finest and most artistic specimens of coloring ever attempted on this side of the water.  The lecture may be accompanied by an elaborate classical setting of vocal and instrumental music.  The ensemble is an earnest effort to assemble in a single evening the best things that art, music and literature have produced on the Life and Labors of our Saviour.




A Sample Musical Setting



(Used in Pabst's Theatre, Milwaukee, Wis., and rendered by the German Choral Society of that city)






HALLELUJAH CHORUS—(Messiah)


Handel




FEAR NOT, O ISREAL—(Jeremiah VI)
Quartet
Max Spicker, Op. 50



PRAISE YE—(Attila)
Vocal Trio
G. Verdi



NOEL—O HOLY NIGHT—Solo-Quartet
(Sung at Scene of the Nativity)
Adolphe Adam


LES RAMEAUX—Solo-Quartet
(Triumphal Entry of Christ into Jerusalem)
Faure



MARCHE FUNEBRE—Instrumenta
(The Carrying to the Tomb.)l
Chopin



UNFOLD YE PORTALS—Chorus
(Scene of the Resurrection)
Gounod



RECESSIONAL—(Praise Ye the Father) Chorus
(March Pontificale)
Gounod





The musical setting of 
The Story Beautiful
 is supplied by local talent, unless special arrangements are made for Father MacCorry's singers, as in the case of the recent Coit Festival Circuit when the International Opera Company supplied the program, or the Ruthven McDonald Company, under the Redpath-Vawter and Redpath-Horner systems for two seasons.




The program, however, may be simplified or omitted entirely as occasion demands.  Naturally, however, its rendition lends largely to the general effect.





Comments Press and Personal



I
T seems to be the proper usage for a Bureau to give sundry press and personal notices regarding the work of each attraction on their list.  Sometimes these have about as much utility as the buttons on the back of a man's coat.  However, we have two personal estimates to submit in the present premises.  Wherever the words Lyceum or Chautauqua are employed the cognoscienti think at once of Keith Vawter and Charles Horner, each of of whom has possibly done the biggest pioneer work along these lines of any other two men in America.  Their judgment is collateral in any bank.




Then, this from Vawter:




Redpath-Vawter Chautauqua System, Cedar Rapids, Iowa.




There is but one man who can tell 
The Story Beautiful
 in the inimitable way that Father MacCorry tells it, and that man is Father MacCorry himself.  He is unlike anyone else on the platform.  He is in a class entirely by himself.  His power of holding his hearers spellbound throughout an evening—of one minute moving them to tears and the next thrilling them with ecstasy—of compelling surrender to one strong emotion after another—is one of his most remarkable characteristics.  This is due not alone to his surpassing eloquence and fire, but in a great degree to the magnetic quality of his voice and manner, to his intense earnestness, and to a most engaging personality.




KEITH VAWTER, Manager.




And from Horner:




Redpath-Western Chautauqua System, New York Life Building, Kansas City, Mo.




Father P. J. MacCorry, in his illustrated lecture, 
The Story Beautiful,
 has, in my opinion, the most remarkable production of the kind that the lecture platform affords.




The mechanical effects are perfect, the pictures artistic triumphs, the lecture itself a literary masterpiece, and the lecturer one of the most powerful and magnetic men on the platform.




Father MacCorry brings to the Lyceum and Chautauqua the highest type of culture and a great dramatic ability.




I believe that although the mechanical perfection and the wonderful pictures of 
The Story Beautiful
 are remarkable, indeed, yet without the assistance of these Father MacCorry is still one of the most masterful orators of the present age.




CHAS. F. HORNER, Manager.




The Story Beautiful has been presented on both of these season-limit circuits.




**** If Father MacCorry can live up to the oratorical pace he set last night in his lecture on 
The Kingship of Man,
 Scranton wants to hear his entire repertory.—


Scranton (Pa.) Republican.




Father MacCorry lectures twice a year in Chicago for the benefit of the charities identified with Old St. Mary's (Paulist) Church.




Let it be said in the words of Lord Macauley that these charities 
are neither small nor few.
Perhaps there is not another lecturer in America who could fill the Orchestra Hall by the mere mention of his name.
Whatever be the explanation the best seats have been sold in the past for these lectures to such wise children of Light who first applied, and repeatedly hundreds (in one instance seven hundred) have been turned away.—
Chicago Evening Post.



The soul of the prophet is in this man, the fire of the orator is in his brain and throughout his lecture the one glows in its soft and mellow light and the other leaps forth in sentences that melt with love and tenderness or terrify with scorn.—


The Wasp, San Francisco, Calif.




The receipts of 
The National Music of Ireland
 last night for the benefit of the good Sisters were two thousand three hundred dollars.  What greater words of commendation could be said for the intrinsic merits of the recital or Chicago's appreciation of Fr. MacCorry's surpassing work.—


Chicago Evening News.




His scathing denunciation of the injustice of the world at the scene of the woman taken in sin—the injustice which stones an erring woman but condones a more sinful man—was like a livid stream of lava, consuming and irresistible in its fiery force.—


Anaconda (Mont.) Standard.




Altho the house is in utter darkness the speaker stands in a halo of soft light, his every gesture and facial expression being visible to the audience.  It is quite unlike anything we have seen before upon the subject and brings the life and times of the Messiah up thro the dim azure of the ages until one thinks it must all have happened a few yesterdays ago.—


New York Sun.




The speaker's complete mastery of that tremendous audience was marvelous.  From the sobs of men and women that shook the entire auditorium at the description of Fuernstien's 
Mother of Sorrows
 to the thrill and ecstasy of the Resurrection, was but five minutes at most, but the transformation was absolute and smiles of triumph played across the audience thro tear-wet faces.—


Chicago Record-Herald.




The lecturer touched the fountain-heads of Art, Music and Literature with his magic wand, and they yielded up the grandest and most precious and the best.  His word-painting vied in brilliancy and in some instances won the mastery over the exquisite coloring of the paintings projected on the massive screen.—


San Francisco (Cal.) Call.