Opie Read

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Opie Read
EXCLUSIVE DIRECTION


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REDPATH LYCEUM BUREAU
BOSTON CHICAGO

Redpath Lyceum Bureau
Western Department
863 Monadnock Block, CHICAGO, ILL.

Central Lyceum Bureau
FRED PELHAM, Manager
415–420 Orchestra Bldg., CHICAGO, ILL.


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ASSOCIATE MEMBER
AMERICAN LYCEUM UNION

S. B. Hershey
Prest & Genl Mgr.
ROCHESTER, N.Y.



An Evening with Opie Read

ANNOUNCEMENT
OPIE READ is like no one else in the world.  His very presence lends a strange enchantment to his stories.  You may have enjoyed his books in the solitude of your library; perchance you have been stirred by his plays, or spent delightful half-hours in the reading of his clever character sketches; but unless you have sat within the sound of his voice, and heard from his own lips the quaint tales that originate in his brain, you do not fully appreciate the splendid genius of the man.  On the platform Mr. Read shines with a brilliance all his own.  Everywhere he is received with enthusiasm.  The indescribable witchery of his words, the charm of his voice and manner, the influence of his personality, combine to weave the magic spell that holds his hearers enthralled.  One minute roaring with laughter at some humorous bit, the next staring at the speaker through hot, blinding tears, with a feeling that you will never smile again — only to break into fresh screams of laughter immediately after — you realize that this remarkable man has the power to sway his audience at will.  Mr. Read is always entertaining.  His program is varied and each number is a gem.  In all his readings he shows himself to be a wonderful delineator of character, and an artist in the interpretation of his own work.



Specimen Program

Negro Whims
Big Bill and Little Bill
Shooting Out the Moon
The Bronsons
Reading Book Reviews
(From a Kentucky Colonel)
Jasper and the Judge
(From the Drama of the Starbucks)
Uncle John Sees Richard III.
Paying His Fare




Steven's Point (Wis.) Gazette
— Opie Read is especially well known, not only as an author and entertainer, but as a newspaper man, he having been a leading writer on the Chicago dailies for years.  In Southern and negro dialect he is certainly a master, and each of his numbers along these lines was perfect in itself, while the encores that he responded to were equally as good.




An Evening with Opie Read

Denver Post
— Last night I had that opportunity to hear Opie Read, and I am still smiling to myself — not alone at what he said, but his manner of saying it.  He is such a big fellow, physically and mentally; so full of vitality and life that his very presence is like a breath of fresh, pure air.  Six feet four, he stands, broad of shoulder and mighty of girth, with a great leonine head crowned with silky dark hair, which he wears a trifle long.  He has a bold, handsome face, with a strong aquiline nose, a pair of luminous eyes fringed with black, and a broad, white brow; a tender, feminine sort of mouth, and the short, round chin with which men of imagination are usually marked.  His voice suits his appearance, being full and mellow, with a full touch of pathos, without which no voice is really beautiful.  Mr. Read is a personage of fame upon two continents — as they read his books, laugh at his humor and applaud his plays in Merry England as much as we do here in our own beloved America.  He has been a newspaper writer, a novelist, a playwriter and a lecturer for many years, and is known and loved all over our country, with which he is as familiar as many of us are with Sixteenth street.  He says that this is his last lecture tour for at least ten years, as he has signed a contract with a great theatrical combine to write one play a year, for that length of time.  They are to give him $10,000 a year, and he thinks, if he tries hard, that he can manage to live on that — that is, he and Mrs. Read and the little Reads.  In the meantime, he is taking a sort of farewell trip through the West, with his eyes very wide open for color and his ears pointed forward for characters — and incidentally, he is giving interpretations of his own stories and plays.  Go and see him.  If you are good material you may some day discover yourself in a metropolitan play, provided he sees you; but you can stand that for the sake of seeing and hearing him. — Polly Pry.


Alton, Ill.
—The audience last evening was highly pleased with the program presented.  Opie Read, the king of American funmakers, gave a number of his popular writings, and delighted everybody.  There is great charm in his productions, and to hear them from the lips of him who wrote is yet more interesting.  Tales of Southern life, now weird, now langhter-producing, were all given in the quaint, characteristic style of the author.


Chicago Tribune
— Opie Read's reputation as a novelist and story-teller of the charming old Southern type, and some of those remarkably clever versified productions that have made his name a familiar one wherever periodicals are read, call forth the literary appreciation their entertainment richly deserves.


Louisville (Ky.) Courier - Journal
— Opie Read is a wonderful delineator of character, strong, clear, and full of a truth as pungent as the scent of walnut in the woods; careful and clear in diction, and never an involved sentence; an artist in the interpretation of his own work.  In his sky there is many a beautiful tint, sunsets of rest and sunrises of promise; and in his words there are thrilling notes, while everywhere in the air about us we hear the sharp cry, Truth, truth!  How genuinely American, how live a product of his native soil!


Pittsburg
— The hall was filled to the door and every number was responded to with hearty applause.  It was evident from the enthusiasm which his appearance evoked that Opie Read was well known.  His readings were mostly taken from among his humorous sketches, though his pathetic bit, An Arkansas Hanging, was well received.  He opened with two of the Arkansas river sketches and these typical and quaintly humorous dialect stories were received with hearty laughter.  The Southern dialect seemed to fall most naturally from his lips, and the broader dialect of the negro was just as good.  Perhaps the piece that found most favor with the crowd was his rendition of Shooting Out the Moon, a delicious bit of fantasy.




An Evening with Opie Read

Denver
— Perhaps no writer of today has told the stories of the South with the charm of Opie Read.  His translation of the poetry, color and folk lore of the old South and the new rings true.  He has written twenty books, nearly every one of which is vibrant with the magnetism and fragrance of Dixie.  He expresses the warm, quick heart-beat of the old plantation life and of the farm life succeeding it.  Read is an inveterate story-teller, and his stories have an indescribable charm.  Keep tab on him one hour at lunch or in the most ordinary run of an evening's light talk, and you will find yourself to the good on twenty new stories, fresh from the inexhaustible Read mint.  He will tell on an average of one story every three minutes.  They are all unpublished tales that suggest the unpublished volumes his big heart has in store.  For all of Opie Read is his heart.  Even his metaphors, and they are the man's strength and his richness, even these are of pure heart thought coinage — not one is an intel lectual comparison.  Read is the one archdreamer and true poet of America who does not essay verse.  He takes a simple rural plot a child heart might conceive and follows it through with the keenest sympathy and a wonderful truthfulness to the life and environment he depicts.  Therein lies the charm of all he does.  Truth — truth to the South of Suwanee river, of the Jucklins and of the waters of Caney Fork.  For richness of color, one could not well surpass a study in the mountains of Tennessee, Virginia or North Carolina.  For a languorous, dreamy day of matchless ease and leisure, one could not surpass the valleys farther south.  Few know this life so well as Opie Read, and none have so well expressed it.  Indeed, so virgin is this field that both Read and the South would be serious losers should Read be tempted to forsake it.  But he never will.  Once the Southern dream, the witchery of the Southland's moonlight and the spell of the wild honeysuckle and the sweetbrier perfume get into the blood they burn like blue fire, like the madness of the blue rose, as long as life lasts.  Read's senses are permeated with the breath of the South's blue rose.—Henry C. Warnack.


Cincinnati (O.) Enquirer
— A large audience, composed of the best citizens, assembled last evening to hear Opie Read, the novelist and story-teller.  The distinguished gentleman was given a hearty welcome.  The entertainment was delightful all the way through, and the audience was enthusiastic.


Davenport (Ia.) Democrat
— With Mr. Read's work most of his auditors and of our readers are familiar.  He mines in the depths of human nature and brings to light its choicest gems.  There is a truth in his sketches that forces the admission from the reader that they are human nature boiled down.  Would that we had more such entertainments in Davenport, and that such preachers of the new gospel of truth and cheerfulness and love were never without an auditory, bounded solely by the limits of the hall in which they speak!


Oshkosh (Wis.) Daily Northwestern
— Opie Read was the whole show.  Being a Southerner himself, the Southern dialect comes to him freely and naturally and almost unconsciously, and his interpretation of the negro dialect is especially true and rich.  He is equally at home in representing the Kentucky colonel.  Mr. Read is a man whose proportions are very large and he towers above the man of ordinary stature like a giant.  His personal appearance is such that he could not but attract attention anywhere.  His hair is long and black and somewhat bushy.  As he wears a broad brimmed hat of Southern style, his general appearance is very much of the Kentucky colonel sort he writes about.  He is brimful of humor at all times, and his stock of witty remarks and bright stories is never near the point of exhaustion.


Steven's Point (Wis.) Daily Journal
— Opie Read has a reputation that is world wide and his works, which have been before the people for many years, are read wherever clean humor is appreciated.




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