The Theatre: Reinhardt's Salzburg

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Midsummer Night's Dream. Again Salzburg buzzed. This happens every year in August. It is then that the better hotels bestir themselves to show celebrated visitors* to the rooms reserved months in advance. It is then that wretched hostelries truss up dilapidated chambers for the heedless hundreds who have arrived without provision. It is the season of the world-famed Festival, when Max Reinhardt† produces old plays in a manner always unique. The one thing visitors can be reasonably sure of in these Festivals is that they will start with a play related in some way to religion, in accordance with the ecclesiastical traditions of the town. This year, at last, it was Everyman, the morality in which God, in a wig, does lusty battle against Satan for the soul of Man, before the ancient doors of the Salzburg Cathedral.

Then came Herr Reinhardt's annual surprise, incorporated in a good old reliable Shakesperean comedy, A Midsummer Night's Dream. Accustomed theatregoers must have gasped when they saw the stage. He had audaciously scrapped the usual Greek setting. Costumed in rococo gowns of an early Italian period, the actors scampered over a circular, sloping stage, before a seemingly infinite column of stairs. Draperies hung in a background clustered with stars were melted by green and orange lights into an elfin heaven. Puck, anointing the wrong lovers with his impish love-dew, flew on and off from so many different levels as to leave the impression that there was no such mortal foolishness as the law of gravity.

The cast was an equally daring move. Only one of the principal female characters was interpreted by an actress who had had speaking experience on the stage. The role of Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons, was entrusted to a young foreign woman—Rosamond Pinchot of the U. S. As the nun in The Miracle she had won recognition as a pantomimist. Now she was called upon to speak for the first time in her career—and in a strange tongue before foreigners. Cast with her were such clearly Teutonic actresses as Katta Sterna (Puck), Maria Solveg (Titania), Tillie Losch (First Elf), Christa Tordy (Helena). Miss Pinchot never once stuttered.

This play, according to cables from Austria, will be presented in Manhattan next month when Max Reinhardt, under management of Gilbert Miller of the Frohman Company (theatrical producers), brings his entire Salzburg Company to the U. S.* Other likely plays: Dante's Death, Love and Intrigue, A Servant of Two Masters.

The City. Few towns have greater wealth of story than Salzburg. There, Marcus Aurelius, soldier, established Roman headquarters among the Teuton tribes and brooded on philosophy. There Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born to music. There the ecclesiastical princes came nearest to realizing the medieval dream of an all-powerful church and a beautiful state.