"Footlights" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... referred by Mr. Lloyd George and M. Clemenceau to Mr. Wilson to deal with. The behavior of her representatives was an illuminating object-lesson in the worth of psychological tactics in practical politics. They hardly ever appeared in the footlights, remained constantly silent and observant, and were almost ignored by the press. But they kept their eyes fixed on the goal. Their program was simple. Amid the flitting shadows of political events they marched together with the Allies, until ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... might have been a card. Fancy the attraction—an emperor before the footlights; but fancy the boredom also. The joy at the announcement of his first appearance was so great that thanks were offered to the gods; and the verses he was to sing, graven in gold, were dedicated to the Capitoline Jove. The joy was brief. The exits of the theatre were closed. ...
— Imperial Purple • Edgar Saltus
... her; found her dancing in Philadelphia, with paint on her cheeks, trinkets on her neck and arms, looking prettier than ever; but the innocent eyes were gone, and I couldn't see my little girl in the bold, handsome woman twirling there before the footlights. She saw me, looked scared at first, then smiled, and danced on with her eyes upon me, as if ...
— Kitty's Class Day And Other Stories • Louisa M. Alcott
... forward, and is not very broad; it represents the auctioneer's end of the room, having, rather to stage Left, a narrow table with two chairs facing the audience, where the auctioneer will sit and stand. The table, which is set forward to the footlights, is littered with green-covered particulars of sale. The audience are in effect public and bidders. There is a door on the Left, level with the table. Along the back wall, behind the table, are two raised benches with two steps up to them, such as billiard rooms ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... agoin' to manage about feedin' him. Thar's no room to the table now, and thar ain't dishes enough to go around, but you're so contrivin' like, I thought you might find out a way." Memories of the footlights were temporarily banished upon hearing this wonderful intelligence. A puzzled pucker came between the brows of the little would-be prima donna and remained there until at last the ...
— Amarilly of Clothes-line Alley • Belle K. Maniates
... well simultaneously speak of two families. 'When two flowers open together,' the proverb says, 'one person can only speak of one.' But whether the stones be true or fictitious, don't let us say anything more about them. Let's have the footlights put in order, and look at the players. Dear senior, do let these two relatives have a glass of wine and see a couple of plays; and you can then start arguing about one dynasty after another. Eh, ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... haply, under the open sky, she might resume her old charm. All Fashion came to marvel and so did all the Aesthetes, in the heart of one of whose leaders, Godwin, that superb architect, the idea was first conceived. Real Pastoral Plays! Lest the invited guests should get any noxious scent of the footlights across the grass, only amateurs were accorded parts. They roved through a real wood, these jerkined amateurs, with the poet's music upon their lips. Never under such dark and griddled elms had the outlaws feasted upon their venison. Never had any Rosalind traced with such shy wonder the writing of ...
— The Works of Max Beerbohm • Max Beerbohm
... be had, use three or four incandescent globes for the fire on the hearth, arranging logs of wood around them to simulate a fire. Additional lights as needed can be placed at the side off stage, or in the footlights; or better, if the stage has a real proscenium these supplementary lights can be put in a "trough" that protects and intensifies them and hung overhead in the center against the back of ...
— Why the Chimes Rang: A Play in One Act • Elizabeth Apthorp McFadden
... BLACK CAT ever again come to the ordeal of the footlights, I can only hope that it may find an audience as sympathetic as that of the ...
— The Black Cat - A Play in Three Acts • John Todhunter
... are using it to help along the army. Seymour Hicks and Edward Knoblauch in one week wrote a play called "England Expects," which was an appeal in dramatic form for recruits, and each night the play was produced recruits crowded over the footlights. ...
— With the Allies • Richard Harding Davis
... them coming back from the war, and pale, benign, leaning on their canes as returning heroes do in plays, talk across the footlights to real young soldiers you have just seen limping in with real wounds—pink-cheeked boys with heads and feet bandaged and Iron Crosses on black-and-white ribbons tucked into their coats, home from East Prussia or the Aisne. Then between the acts you must imagine them pouring ...
— Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them • Arthur Ruhl
... like a leaf," exclaimed my aunt. "I am afraid of being ill. Do you hear the gentlemen who are dressing in there in the Baron's dressing room? What a noise! Ha! ha! ha! it is charming, a regular gang of strollers. It is exhilarating, do you know, this feverish existence, this life in front of the footlights. But, for the love of Heaven, shut the door, Marie, there is a frightful draught blowing on me. This hourly struggle with the public, the hisses, the applause, would, with my impressionable nature, drive me ...
— Monsieur, Madame and Bebe, Complete • Gustave Droz
... of seeing Talma in one of his famous roles? Lucien was fascinated by the theatre, that first love of all poetic temperaments; the actors and actresses were awe-inspiring creatures; he did not so much as dream of the possibility of crossing the footlights and meeting them on familiar terms. The men and women who gave him so much pleasure were surely marvelous beings, whom the newspapers treated with as much gravity as matters of national interest. To be a dramatic author, to have a play ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... Behind footlights it would have been irresistible, but somehow it did not touch the one spectator, though she had neither time nor skill to discover why. For all their ardor the words did not ring quite true. Despite the grace of the attitude, she would have liked him better manfully erect upon his ...
— Rose in Bloom - A Sequel to "Eight Cousins" • Louisa May Alcott
... her lines; I will ask all and sundry to drop in with just a few hours' notice, as she did. Everything shall be good, and there shall be about it all something that I seemed to miss last night. There was a little bit—how shall I say it?—a little bit of the footlights about it all. And the footlights didn't seem to me to have been extinguished at church-time this morning. The singing of that very fine aria was theatrical, I can't call it ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... myself, and I'd rather see one of the same gang win out before I would an East-Sider, or any of the Flatbush or Hackensack Meadow kind of butt-iners. I'll see that Junius Rollins is present on your Friday night; and if he don't climb over the footlights and offer you fifty a week as a starter, I'll let you draw it down from my own salary every Monday night. Now, am I talking on the level ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry
... than the other players. There was no make- believe about Mother. She thundered across the stage and stood before the footlights, interrupting many a performance with her stubborn common-sense and her grip upon difficult grave issues. 'This performance will finish at such and such an hour,' was her cry. 'Get your wraps ready. It will be cold when you go out. And see that you have money handy for your 'bus fares home!' ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... boisterous mirth, Far dim-seen hours of arduous fight When gaiety possessed the earth, When morning felt no fear of night; School-form, field, footlights, club! Eheu Fugaces! These, indeed, are fled, But thoughts of dashing MONTAGU, That dauntless soul now lying dead, After long fight with pitiless pain Make the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 104, January 7, 1893 • Various
... of helpless fury and despair! Men hurled themselves over the footlights in vain pursuit of the assassin. Already the clatter of his horse's feet could be heard in the distance. A surgeon threw himself against the door of the box, but it had been barred within by the cunning hand. Another leaped on the stage, and the people lifted him up in their ...
— The Clansman - An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan • Thomas Dixon
... around the Bishop's throne—a great square chair approached by steps, and rendered still more imposing by the canopy, whose voluminous folds fell on either side like those of a corpulent woman's dress. Opposite was the stage. The footlights were turned down, but the blue mountains and brown palm-trees of the drop-curtain, painted by one of the nuns, loomed through the red obscurity of the room. Benches had been set along the walls. Between them a strip of carpet, worked with ...
— Muslin • George Moore
... with Lamb here. Hissing seems to me to proceed for the most part from ill-temper, or at least from the dissatisfaction of the head. Applause is often the outburst of the heart, the gush of a feeling, an enthusiasm incapable of restraint. No wonder that the retired actor longs for a sniff of the footlights and for the echo of the reverberating plaudits to the accompaniment of which ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878 • Various
... stark moment no one stirred, then suddenly a man with an opera-cloak on his arm was seen to spring across a space of many feet between a box on the level of the stage and the stage itself. He crashed into the footlights, but recovered himself and ran forward. In an instant he had enveloped the agonized figure of the singer and had crushed out the ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... faces turn away From nations and their little wars; But we our golden drama play Before the footlights ...
— An Anthology of Australian Verse • Bertram Stevens
... turning to Dorothy. "You enter from vhere you are, valking to de center of de stage, down near de footlights. Smile, Miss Dorothy, und do not put your violin to your shoulder until de orchestra is half way t'rough ...
— Dorothy's Triumph • Evelyn Raymond
... the girls returned, and 'tis needless to tell their wonder. They preferred the stage, yet condescended to say they would favour the ball, since Mrs Bellamy counselled it. "But, never, never will it turn my heart from the charming footlights!" says Maria. ...
— The Ladies - A Shining Constellation of Wit and Beauty • E. Barrington
... the same time she must be sufficiently conscious that she was placing a part not to let any impulse of aversion betray her. The tea-table scene had been a rehearsal; coming was a premiere before the ghostly, still faces across the bent glare of the footlights. No ready-made lines, hers She must create them. Every word must be the right word and spoken in the right way, all for the deception ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... invariably unpunctual publishers. As though Time pressed behind them with his scythe, hatchet-faced journalists from Fleet Street were making a bee-line for the restaurant. In contrast to this perfervid haste, self-possessed young queens of the footlights lolled with their admirers, importantly believing they were recognized. All the medley of London as it used to be, is and will be again, was there; but nowhere could Tabs descry ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson
... dramatis personae, at the end. Murder, suicide, poison, dagger, lightning even decimated their ranks, and when the curtain dropped there was not a soul of them left alive. The crowning effect of this parody was the appearance of the prompter himself before the footlights. In a few tear-choked words he informed the audience that after seeing the actors all die, and nothing but corpses around him, he could and would not survive, and so he made an end of himself, too, using a rope for ...
— A Little Garrison - A Realistic Novel of German Army Life of To-day • Fritz von der Kyrburg
... wired into a screen to hide the footlights, was drooping away already and showing the supporting wires. The benches were stacked against the wall, all but an ill-omened row designed for wall-flowers, and the floor was cleared and waxed. But little patches of wax that were not rubbed in lurked for unwary ...
— The Wishing Moon • Louise Elizabeth Dutton
... street and dropped into the opera house in time to hear the grand finale of the last piece by the band. As the great outburst of music died away, Captain Tolliver radiantly stepped to the footlights, dividing the applause ...
— Aladdin & Co. - A Romance of Yankee Magic • Herbert Quick
... dramatic art (if that is all) when the workman confronts his master and says, "I'm a man." But a workman does say "I'm a man" two or three times every day. In fact, it is tedious, possibly, to hear poor men being melodramatic behind the footlights; but that is because one can always hear them being melodramatic in the street outside. In short, melodrama, if it is dull, is dull because it is too accurate. Somewhat the same problem exists in the case of stories ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... tale of woe, being dissatisfied with the dress that she was to wear in a new part. I saw her frequently again when war had been declared, for she it was who, every evening, with overpowering force and art, sang the Marseillaise from before the footlights. ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... sing. The first singer that entered my stage was Signor Grasshopper. He mounted a mullein leaf and sang, and sang, and sang, until Professor Turkey Gobbler slipped up behind him with open mouth, and Signor Grasshopper vanished from the footlights forevermore. And as Professor Turkey Gobbler strutted off my stage with a merry gobble, the orchestra opened before me with a flourish of trumpets. The katydid led off with a trombone solo; the cricket chimed in with his E. flat cornet; the bumblebee played on ...
— Gov. Bob. Taylor's Tales • Robert L. Taylor
... recall a saccharine tune sung by someone who strode stiffly to and fro in a glare of amber footlights—wasn't there a song about: "And I lo-ong to settle down, in that old Long Island town!" Wasn't there such a ditty? It came softly back, unbidden, to the sentimental attic of our memory as we passed along that fine avenue of trees and revisited, for the ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... I had not counted on the high gods who crowd shadowy into the silent seats and are jealous of a mortal in their midst. Without warning was I wrested from my place, hurled onto the stage, and before my dazzled eyes could accustom themselves to the footlights, I found myself enmeshed in intolerable drama. I was unprepared. I knew my part imperfectly. I missed my cues. I had the blighting self-consciousness of the amateur. And yet the idiot mummery was intensely real. Amid the laughter of the silent shadowy gods I thought ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... real skies The actor's short-lived triumph dies: On that broad stage of empire won, Whose footlights were the setting sun, Whose flats a distant background rose In trackless peaks of endless snows; Here genius bows, and talent waits To ...
— Complete Poetical Works of Bret Harte • Bret Harte
... talents, but we needn't hide them in a napkin because they are not just what we want. I say, let Jo have her way, and do what she can. Here am I to take care of her; and you can't deny you'd enjoy fixing her furbelows, and seeing her shine before the footlights, where you used to long to be. Come, mother, better face the music and march gaily, since your wilful children will "gang their ...
— Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott
... play. Everybody had a narrative and a grievance, and none were reasonable about it, but all in an offensive and ungovernable state. There was little of that sort of customary thing where the tenor and the soprano stand down by the footlights, warbling, with blended voices, and keep holding out their arms toward each other and drawing them back and spreading both hands over first one breast and then the other with a shake and a pressure—no, it ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... uproar. Forced to stop; he quietly folded his arms and faced the storm, expecting it would soon blow over. Finding himself mistaken—that if anything it grew louder and fiercer, his disdain turned into foolish anger, and advancing to the footlights, and throwing all the contempt and scorn into his face that he was master of, he deliberately walked the entire breadth of the stage, gazing haughtily as he did so, into the faces of the roughs nearest him, who were bawling their ...
— The Great Riots of New York 1712 to 1873 • J.T. Headley
... head and shoulders, yes. But I hate love-making on the stage, almost as much as I do dying. I never see a pair of lovers beyond the footlights without wanting to kill them." The actor remained looking at him over his folded arms, and Maxwell continued, with something like a personal rancor against love-making, while he gave a little, bitter laugh, ...
— The Story of a Play - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... have capered through these pages of this chapter—all of the people in this story in their love affairs. Hand in hand, they have come to the footlights, hand in hand they have walked before us. We have seen that love is a passion with many sides. It varies with each soul. In youth, in maturity, in courtship, in marriage, in widowhood, in innocence, and in the wisdom of serpents, love ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... edge of the stage. There were no footlights in those days. Favourite though Jack Hall was not a hand nor a voice was raised to greet him. Jack Hall lost his nerve—which, however, as it turned out was the most fortunate thing which could have happened—and this ...
— Madame Flirt - A Romance of 'The Beggar's Opera' • Charles E. Pearce
... through the little round holes of her mask, saw the big curtain slowly ascend, revealing only a dazzling row of footlights beyond. Then gradually out of the dusk loomed the vast auditorium with its row after row of dim white faces, reaching back and up, up further than she dared lift her head to see. From down below somewhere sounded the weird tinkle of elfin music, and tiptoeing out from every tree and bush ...
— Calvary Alley • Alice Hegan Rice
... had been recognized by dozens of people as he stood before the footlights brandishing his dagger, his swift horse soon carried him beyond any hap-hazard pursuit. He crossed the Navy Yard bridge and rode into Maryland, being joined by one of his fellow-conspirators. A surgeon named Mudd set Booth's leg and ...
— The Boys' Life of Abraham Lincoln • Helen Nicolay
... Ravenel saw Katrine, but in a blurred vision with fold upon fold of gauze between them. Finally the soldiers and maidens disappeared, and there came an expectant hush. One heard now! The pause was marked, intentional, before there came toward the footlights, in their most relentless glare, a girl with gladness and joy in her very walk. Neither a heavy German peasant girl nor a French soubrette. No dreary, timid, maedchen, but a glad young soul conscious of nothing save joy, with the beauty in her face of youth and power ...
— Katrine • Elinor Macartney Lane
... awake, even though —— or —— should be addressing the House. During all that Sunday which he maintains should be a day of rest, the active clergyman toils like a galley-slave. The actor, when eight o'clock comes, is bound to his footlights. The Civil Service clerk must sit there from ten till four,—unless his office be fashionable, when twelve to six is just as heavy on him. The author may do his work at five in the morning when he is fresh from his bed, or at three in the morning before he ...
— Autobiography of Anthony Trollope • Anthony Trollope
... first thing I knows I'm trailin' up the stairs. There wa'n't any need to do the sleuth act after Marjorie got started. Anyone on the floor could have heard it; for she was spoutin' the Juliet lines like a carriage caller, and whenever she made a rush to the footlights the floor beams creaked. It was enough to drag a laugh out of a hearse driver. And guess what the guy was ...
— Torchy • Sewell Ford
... impossible now. We were the first, and we were pioneers and we were new. To be new is everything in America. Such palaces as the Hudson Theatre, New York, were not dreamed of when we were at the Star, which was, however, quite equal to any theatre in London, in front of the footlights. The stage itself, the lighting appliances, ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... to get on the war paint. Say, have you offered your services for the Friar Festival yet? Well, you had better get on the job if you want to consider yourself classy. So long! Oh, you know the ushers will hand flowers over the footlights if you just tell him who they ...
— The Sorrows of a Show Girl • Kenneth McGaffey
... was also the first play of Mr. Yeats to be put on in America, being presented with Miss Mabel Taliaferro in the fairy's role as the curtain-raiser to Mrs. Le Moyne's production of "In a Balcony," in the spring of 1901. Fragile as is its charm, it crossed the footlights and made itself felt as a new beauty of the theatre. It was the lyrical interbreathings that appealed most to me, but the strife of priest and fairy for Maire Bruin's soul was very real drama. It was the fairy's song, however, that haunted me after I left the theatre, ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... tables, shouted, and swung their hats, and even the women cheered at the tops of their voices. A repetition was loudly called for, and Ilka, although herself overcome with emotion, was obliged to yield. She walked up to the footlights and began to yodle softly. It sounded strangely airy and far away. She put her hand to her ear and listened for a moment, as if she expected a reply; but there was a breathless silence in the audience. Only a heavy sigh came ...
— Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... pause had grown embarrassing, a shamed looking man slouched forward from an aisle seat amid hearty cheers. He ascended the carpeted runway from aisle to stage, stumbled over footlights and dropped his hat. Then the magician harried him to the malicious glee of the audience. He removed playing-cards, white rabbits and articles of feminine apparel from beneath the coat of his victim. ...
— Bunker Bean • Harry Leon Wilson
... picture of her greatest public triumphs receives tender and artistic touches in the view we are given of the idol of brilliant and intellectual London sitting down with her husband and father to a frugal home supper on retiring from the glare of the footlights.—Commonwealth. ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... as moonlight from footlights. If ever you went into the Casino, you couldn't have helped having her pointed out to you. She's always there, and she's so awfully pretty and dresses so—so richly, and wins such a lot that everybody stares and talks. She's ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... the reader said, "how beatific it always was to have the minor coryphees subside in nebulous ranks on either side of the stage, and have the great planetary splendor of the prima ballerina come swiftly floating down the centre to the very footlights, beaming right and left? Ah, there's nothing in life now like that radiant moment! But even that was eclipsed when she rose on tiptoe and stubbed it down the scene on the points of her slippers, with the soles of her feet showing vertical in the ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... Conried. As far as I could see, Raffles was wrapt in the music of the moment, and not once, to my knowledge, did he seem to be aware that there was such a thing as an audience, much less one individual member of it, on the other side of the footlights. Like a member of the Old Choral Guard, he went through the work in hand as nonchalantly as though it were his regular business in life. It was during the intermission between the first and second acts that I began to suspect that there ...
— R. Holmes & Co. • John Kendrick Bangs
... baubles, "testimonials," reminiscent of "evenings of honor," when admirers had surprised her in the green room while outside the audience was applauding wildly, and she, lowering her lance, and surrounded by ushers with huge bouquets, would step forward to the footlights and make her bow of acknowledgment, under a deluge of tinsel and flowers. One medallion bore the portrait of the venerable don Pedro of Brazil, the artist-emperor, who paid tribute to the singer in a greeting written in diamonds. Gem-incrusted frames of gold ...
— The Torrent - Entre Naranjos • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... did the whole thing herself—conquered us. We were laughing and cheering in half an hour. In the end we rocked in our seats and howled tumultuously when the sergeant-major, a portly man of great dignity, was dragged over the footlights. Our lady pirouetted across the stage and back again, her arm round the sergeant-major's waist, her cheek on his shoulder, singing, "If I were the only girl in the world and you were the ...
— A Padre in France • George A. Birmingham
... that offered deplorably little of novelty and adventure she would not for worlds have thrown away such a chance. Meryl, on the other hand, would probably not have felt the tension; she would have quietly walked past him out at the entrance. Diana felt the atmosphere of the footlights and ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... checkered existence," smiled Mr. Hazen. "Many very amusing incidents centered about them. Were I to talk until doomsday I could not begin to tell you the multitudinous adventures Mr. Bell and Mr. Watson had during their platform career; for although Mr. Watson was never really before the footlights as Mr. Bell was, he was an indispensable part of the show,—the power behind the scenes, the man at the other end of the wire, who furnished the lecture hall with such stunts as would not only convince an audience ...
— Ted and the Telephone • Sara Ware Bassett
... for the last hour, and now a goodly company of courtiers and dames stood about waiting while Miss Tebbs and Miss Kane rapidly "made up their faces" with rouge and powder. This being done to prevent them from looking too pale when in the white glare of the footlights. ...
— Grace Harlowe's Junior Year at High School - Or, Fast Friends in the Sororities • Jessie Graham Flower
... was sanded and drank beer until the small hours. These men were representatives of their profession so far as America is concerned. There were no stars among them and none of the lowest stratum. They were of the middle class of the people of the footlights. Nearly all of them were married and a few of them had children. They had the small ambitions and the small amusements of ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... pass over the hours as only stories and dreams do, and put ourselves, at ten of the clock that night, behind the green curtain and the footlights, in the blaze of the three rows of bright lamps, that, one above another, poured their illumination from the left upon the stage, behind ...
— Junior Classics, V6 • Various
... all Mlle. Vinteuil's actions the appearance of evil was so strong and so consistent that it would have been hard to find it exhibited in such completeness save in what is nowadays called a 'sadist'; it is behind the footlights of a Paris theatre, and not under the homely lamp of an actual country house, that one expects to see a girl leading her friend on to spit upon the portrait of a father who has lived and died for nothing and no one but herself; ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... hear the opening piano solo by the "long-haired fellow," as Hock had called him, nor did he rhapsodize over handsome Miss Van Alstine, whose wonderful gown and thrilling voice captured the audience. It was only when a slender, dark, elderly man stepped down to the footlights with a violin in his long, thin hands that Archie sat bolt upright, his eyes blazing with excitement, his breath catching ...
— The Shagganappi • E. Pauline Johnson
... gallery, parquet; greenroom, coulisses[Fr]. flat; drop, drop scene; wing, screen, side scene; transformation scene, curtain, act drop; proscenium. stage, scene, scenery, the boards; trap, mezzanine floor; flies; floats, footlights; offstage; orchestra. theatrical costume, theatrical properties. movie studio, back lot, on location. part, role, character, dramatis personae[Lat]; repertoire. actor, thespian, player; method actor; stage player, strolling player; stager, performer; mime, mimer[obs3]; artists; comedian, tragedian; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... melodramatic sort of thing you read about, or used to read about, in the early days, with a couple of Winchesters poking through the scrub pines to represent the gang in hiding, and one lone, crippled desperado to come down to the footlights in the speaking part. ...
— The Taming of Red Butte Western • Francis Lynde
... fallen close to the footlights, to represent an "Ante-room in the Palace." Attendants bring on two dressing-tables. Enter the two principal danseuses, who are about to dress for the Grand Ballet, when Lulli, the Composer, and Prevot, the Maitre de dance du Roi, come in and very inconsiderately propose a rehearsal, which ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, June 25, 1892 • Various
... on a group of photographs in the shape of postal cards; a wonderful assortment of fleshlings, of young ladies who dazzle and display abundant charms before the footlights. He remembered that an explanation was due to Snorky, and that the explanation would have to be very convincing. One photograph fascinated him; it was so like the way Tina would look, if ...
— Skippy Bedelle - His Sentimental Progress From the Urchin to the Complete - Man of the World • Owen Johnson
... but I had never seen anything of the kind. I had never been in a theater, or even a concert room, or seen any form of public amusement. It was much the same with "Davy" McCargo, "Harry" Oliver, and "Bob" Pitcairn. We all fell under the fascination of the footlights, and every opportunity to attend ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie • Andrew Carnegie
... forth, their hands intertwined. And now the log fire, seeing the lack of better footlights, blazed up loyally to light for them this unusual stage. They did not hear the door open behind them, did not hear the click of high bootheels on the floor, as there came toward them an unbidden spectator, who had by some slack servant ...
— Heart's Desire • Emerson Hough
... agreed, "but in the strong lights of the stage and the footlights too, you have to pile it ...
— Patty Blossom • Carolyn Wells
... faces are green; they wear greenstone sandals, they walk with knees extremely wide apart, as having sat cross-legged for centuries, their right arms and right forefingers point upwards, right elbows resting on left hands: they stoop grotesquely: halfway to the footlights they wheel left. They pass in front of the seven beggars, now in terrified attitudes and six of them sit down in the attitude described, with their backs to the audience. The leader stands, still stooping. Just as they wheel left, OOGNO cries out.) ...
— Selections from the Writings of Lord Dunsay • Lord Dunsany
... I had made up my mind in my earliest days to go to the Bar or on the Stage, and that love for the histrionic art (sometimes called the footlights) never left me. ...
— The Reminiscences Of Sir Henry Hawkins (Baron Brampton) • Henry Hawkins Brampton
... Hop-Picker is not only utterly English in atmosphere, but also peculiarly Kentish. Still, with such a brilliantly intelligent, marvellously sympathetic public as yours, I don't despair of bringing the hop-poles over the footlights, so to say. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, March 25, 1914 • Various
... formless, golden joy. She was aware of people—her aunt, her father, her fellow-students, friends, and neighbors—moving about outside this glowing secret, very much as an actor is aware of the dim audience beyond the barrier of the footlights. They might applaud, or object, or interfere, but the drama was her very own. She was going through ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... Garden. As for Coleridge, the negligent Sheridan did not even condescend to acknowledge the receipt of his manuscript; his play was passed from hand to hand among the Drury Lane Committee; but not till many years afterwards did Osorio find its way under another name to the footlights. ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... melodramas of forgotten British playwrights, Daudet was influenced rather by the virile dramas of Dumas fils and Augier. But in "Fromont and Risler," not only is the plot a trifle stagy, but the heroine herself seems almost a refugee of the footlights; exquisitely presented as Sidonie is, she fails quite to captivate or convince, perhaps because her sisters have been seen so often before in this play and in that. And now and again even in his later novels we discover that Daudet has needlessly ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... of studio lighting as artificial and unworthy is silly. It is pretty hard to find anything really artificial in the world, indoors, or out, or even in the glare of the footlights. I think the main idea is that a man should prefer doing what the public calls his work, to any other form of recreation—should use enough reason—not too much—enough inspiration—but watching himself at every brush stroke; and finally should feel physically unfettered—that is, have ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... stage, and the rest of the room as auditorium. But the stage of a private bar is more mysterious than the stage of a theatre. You are closer to it, and yet it is far less approachable. The edge of the counter is more sacred than the footlights. Impossible to imagine yourself leaping over it. Impossible to imagine yourself in that cloistered place behind it. Impossible to imagine how the priestesses got themselves into that place, or that they ever leave it. They are always ...
— The Grim Smile of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... object in the place. This is a beautiful little miniature theatre,—that is to say, the orchestra and stage. It is fitted with charmingly painted scenery and all the appliances for scenic changes. There are tiny traps, and delicately constructed "lifts," and real footlights fed with burning-fluid, and in the orchestra sits a diminutive conductor before his desk, surrounded by musical manikins, all provided with the smallest of violoncellos, flutes, oboes, drums, and such like. There are characters also on the stage. A Templar in a white cloak is dragging ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... and walked around defining the figure eight, just as any one in the audience chose to request; and Abdallah came in with a string of bells around her, and paced, cantered, galloped, trotted, marched or walked as the word was given. The horses were generally expected to come to the footlights and bow to the audience at the close of any feat; occasionally one would forget to do this, and then some of his comrades would shoulder or buffet him, or Mr. Bartholomew would give a reminder, "That is not all, is it?" and back would come ...
— Our Boys - Entertaining Stories by Popular Authors • Various
... she will call upon me to-morrow," she thought, as she directed the note, and that night she dreamed that Amy came to her, with a face and voice so like her mother's that she woke with a start and a feeling that she had really seen her mother, as she used to stand before the footlights, while the house rang with ...
— The Cromptons • Mary J. Holmes
... interrupted Talbot Potter, who had taken his seat at a small table near the trough where the footlights lay asleep, like the row of night-watchmen they were. "Not at all!" he repeated sharply, thumping the table with his knuckles. "That's all out. It's cut. Nippert doesn't come on in this scene at all. You've got the original script there, Packer. Good heavens! ...
— Harlequin and Columbine • Booth Tarkington
... had to fortify Corinth. A vast army, Grant, Buell, Halleck, Sherman, all were advancing on Corinth. Our troops were in no condition to fight. In fact, they had seen enough of this miserable yet tragic farce. They were ready to ring down the curtain, put out the footlights and go home. They loved the Union anyhow, and were always opposed to this war. But breathe softly the name of Bragg. It had more terror than the advancing hosts of Halleck's army. The shot and shell would come tearing through ...
— "Co. Aytch" - Maury Grays, First Tennessee Regiment - or, A Side Show of the Big Show • Sam R. Watkins
... over this, being of the opinion that I was paying a just tribute to his histrionic acumen and judgement in things theatrical, on which he prided himself on account of his having appeared once behind the footlights in a theatre in Liverpool, as a "super," I believe, and in a part where he had ...
— The Ghost Ship - A Mystery of the Sea • John C. Hutcheson
... commonly known to his acquaintances since the publication of Martin Chuzzlewit ten years before). Hall was a genuine comedy figure. Such oily and voluble sanctimoniousness needed no modification to be fitted to appear before the footlights in satirical drama. He might be called an ingenuous hypocrite, an artless humbug, a veracious liar, so obviously were the traits indicated innate and organic in him rather than acquired. Dickens, after all, missed some of the finer shades of the character; ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... good, the audience would have none of it; in a crescendo of uproarious demand it invited her to try again. Patient as a cat waiting for its chin to be stroked the conductor sat with extended baton. Down to the footlights she minced, delicately as Agag to the downfall of his hopes, thrust out an impudent face, and waggled it. "I can't! You know I can't!" she remonstrated in a shrill cockney wail. And straight on the anticipated word the house roared its applause. ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... London is never at its best in early September, even for the habitue. There was nothing to do. Most of the theatres were shut. The streets were damp and dirty. It was all very well for the generals, appearing every night in the glare and glitter of the footlights; but for the rank and file the occupation of London ...
— The Swoop! or How Clarence Saved England - A Tale of the Great Invasion • P. G. Wodehouse
... poets who cannot write plays, she is surcharged with dramatic energy. But, to use a familiar phrase, it is action in character rather than character in action which marks her work most impressively, and the latter is the essential element for the footlights. Shakespeare, Rostand, and Barrie have both, and are naturally therefore great dramatists. Two of the most of Miss Branch's poems are Lazarus Ora Pro Nobis. These are fruitful subjects for poetry, the man who came back from the grave and the passionate ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... twenty-five years ago, but which I would now willingly sacrifice to make the Sunny South prosperous and happy. Will you take it, General?' There was a moment's hesitation, a moment of death-like stillness in the hall, and then General Lee was on his feet, his hand was extended across the footlights, and was quickly met by the preacher's warm grasp. At first there was a murmur, half surprise, half-doubtfulness, by the audience. Then there was a hesitating clapping of hands, and before Mr. Beecher had loosed the hand of Robert ...
— Hidden Treasures - Why Some Succeed While Others Fail • Harry A. Lewis
... one evening I spent at a little station in Bengal, between Lucknow and Delhi, an evening given over to private theatricals. The theatre was a huge tent, and the little roughly improvised stage was lit by a row of oil footlights and so small as barely to give a foothold for the actors and actresses in the more crowded scenes. About me were the great people, the colonel's wife, a touring young man of family, officers and the wife of the manager of the big sugar refinery close at hand. Behind ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... a private personal accomplishment. On the stage, having steered clear of comedy and confined myself to tragedy, it had never been cheapened and made nauseous by sham and machine representations indigenous to the hated footlights, and was an untapped preserve to be drawn ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin
... for an hour with an artist who has so often charmed you from the other side of the footlights, is a most interesting experience. In the present instance it began with my being taken up to Miss Farrar's private sanctum, at the top of her New York residence. Though this is her den, where she studies and works, it is a ...
— Vocal Mastery - Talks with Master Singers and Teachers • Harriette Brower
... place immediately after light supper. The great hall was arranged for the occasion. A stage was erected at the farther end, in the darkest and most shadowy spot. Across the stage a great curtain was drawn, and footlights had been secured to throw up the antics of the different animals the twelve girls were to act. One was the kitchen cat. Daisy was to be dressed exactly to fit the part by Miss Kent's and Hollyhock's clever contrivance. The kitchen cat must have a poor thin body, all dressed in shabby ...
— Hollyhock - A Spirit of Mischief • L. T. Meade
... it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come; the readiness is all. Let be." Then follow the courtesy, the grace, the fraud, the justice, of the swift, last scene; the curtain falls; and now the yearning sympathies of the hearers break out into sound, and the actor comes before the footlights to receive his meed of praise. How commonplace it is to read that such a one was called before the curtain and bowed his thanks! But sit there; listen to the applauding clamor of two thousand voices, be yourself lifted on the waves of that exultation, and for a moment ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... temptation to which we yield—all radiant and beautiful on the hither side, and when we get past it and look back at it, all hideous. Like some of those painted canvases upon the theatre-stage: seen from this side, with the delusive brilliancy of the footlights thrown upon them, they look beautiful works of art; seen at the back, dirty and cobwebbed canvas, all splashes and spots and uglinesses. Let us be thankful if memory can show us the reverse side of the temptations that on the near side were ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... to being such a man about town as that. I have seen plays, of course, and some by the great Master Will, and I do confess that the mock life I behold beyond the footlights often thrills me more than the real life I see this side of them. Once, I witnessed this play 'Richard III,' which we are now about to see, and it stirred me so I could scarce contain myself, though some do say ...
— The Shadow of the North - A Story of Old New York and a Lost Campaign • Joseph A. Altsheler
... an Arab, who had attracted my notice by the attention he had paid to my tricks, jumped over four rows of seats, and disdaining the use of the "practicable," crossed the orchestra, upsetting flutes, clarionets, and violins, escaladed the stage, while burning himself at the footlights, and then ...
— The Lock and Key Library/Real Life #2 • Julian Hawthorne
... made the audience seem immense, since it took every available box and board to construct "opera chairs" for the crowd; but every chair was sure to be filled when the new "star," Signora Dexina, was announced to appear before the footlights, and if these latter were but candles left from the last Christmas tree, ...
— Miss Dexie - A Romance of the Provinces • Stanford Eveleth
... stealing back. The orchestra boils over in a cadence and stops. The theater is darkened again. The footlights come on with a flash. The curtain silently lifts, and ...
— Behind the Beyond - and Other Contributions to Human Knowledge • Stephen Leacock
... have kept Mr. Muir close to the footlights most of the time, allowing Mr. Burroughs to hover in the background where he blends with the neutral tones; but so it was in all the thrilling scenes in the Western drama—Mr. Muir and the desert, Mr. Muir and the petrified trees, Mr. Muir and the canon, Mr. Muir ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus
... it's all only imitation," he explained, "but it will look just as good as the real thing behind the footlights. But you ought to see the stage when it's fixed up to look like the Hall of the Shields, if you want to see glitter. It's be-yu-tiful! Like the one at Camelot, ...
— Two Little Knights of Kentucky • Annie Fellows Johnston
... own idea. The house, you must understand, is one-half floored, and one-half bare earth, and the dais stands a little over knee high above the level of the soil. The dais was the stage, with three footlights. We audience sat on mats on the floor, and the cook and three of our work-boys, sometimes assisted by our two ladies, took their places behind the footlights and began a topical Vailima song. The burden was of course that of a Samoan popular song about a white man who objects to all that he sees ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... suddenly took on a rapid crescendo, ascending a full third in the scale and then dying abruptly in a little high falsetto shriek; and Bobby, with a lady upon either arm, found his little trio immediately alone in the center of the stage, a row of dim footlights cutting off effectually any view into the vast emptiness of ...
— The Making of Bobby Burnit - Being a Record of the Adventures of a Live American Young Man • George Randolph Chester
... influence could do much to divert or modify every natural trait. He could not doubt that he had this power over her then. How far, and to what purpose, should he exert it? For himself he wished to discourage any hankering on her part for public life, and, most of all, public life behind the footlights, under an artificial sky. No one knew better than he that there are certain things of love, of nobility, of temperament, of pride, in certain lives which the world at large would rather calumniate than comprehend. People in general clung to their opinions not because they were true, but because they ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... all the stupendousness of the times rushed over me that you and I, who have rubbed our noses on historical monuments so often, have chased after emotions on the scenes of past heroism, and applauded mock heroics across the footlights, should be living in days like these, days in which heroism is the common act of every hour. I cannot help wondering what the future generations are going to say of it all; how far-off times are going to judge us; what is going to stand out in the strong limelight of history? I know what I think, ...
— On the Edge of the War Zone - From the Battle of the Marne to the Entrance of the Stars and Stripes • Mildred Aldrich
... to live in posterity is to be like an actor who leaps over the footlights and talks ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... chairman, puffing at a huge cigar, used his little hammer and announced "Miss Sally Slater will appear next." Battlemoor roared approval, and then in a short skirt and black stockings Sally rushed to the footlights and took her audience, as it were, by ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... facade. Chairs, beds—all the domestic economy of the house—sagged visibly outward toward the street, or stood still firm, but open to the four winds. It was as if the scene were prepared for a stage and you sat before the footlights looking into the interior. Again, the next house and that beyond were utterly gone—side walls, front walls, everything swallowed up and vanished—the iron work twisted into heaps, the stone work crumbled to dust; the whole mass of ruin still smoked, for it was a shell ...
— They Shall Not Pass • Frank H. Simonds
... a good deal of risk, as well as of convenience, in suspended animation. People do not always welcome Rip Van Winkle when he returns to life, as we would all welcome Mr. Jefferson if he revisited the glimpses of the footlights, ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang
... streaks of escaped illuminating gas—if this heavy, lifeless air is more welcome to your nostrils than could be the clover-sweetened breath of the greenest pasture; if that great black gulf, yawning beyond the extinguished footlights, makes your heart leap up at your throat; if without noting the quality or length of your part the just plain, bald fact of "acting something" thrills you with nameless joy; if the rattle-to-bang of the ill-treated old overture dances through your blood, and the rolling ...
— Stage Confidences • Clara Morris
... resentment beyond the grave; for even after Kenneth died of a fever contracted in the Crimea, and his widow was left unprovided for, and with the pleasant alternative of starving to death or dragging the noble name of Dugald before the footlights of the stage, my father politely informed her that she was at liberty to go on the stage or to go to—hem! It was then that I offered La Faustina an asylum in my house, which she accepted. And I hope, Lady ...
— Self-Raised • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... citadel, to beat down the faithful guard and to carry war into the enemy's camp. One night he dashed past the astonished guardian of the stage entrance just as the curtain fell upon one of the acts of a play. He emerged before the footlights, eluding all pursuit, dressed as a harlequin, and, before the audience had recovered from its astonishment at this scene not set down in the bills, the baffled, but not subdued, aspirant had delivered the lines of an epilogue in rhyme with so much ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... pastime is a pathetic thing, come to think about it. It shows what a desperately grim thing life has become. One of the most significant things I know is that breathless, expectant, adoring hush that falls over a theatre at a Saturday matinee, when the house goes dark and the footlights set the bottom of the curtain in a glow, and the latecomers tank over your ...
— The Haunted Bookshop • Christopher Morley
... misgivings, naturally. Hunting Indians across a stage differed from following them across the Plains. I knew the wild western Indian and his ways. I was totally unacquainted with the tame stage Indian, and the thought of a great gaping audience looking at me across the footlights made ...
— An Autobiography of Buffalo Bill (Colonel W. F. Cody) • Buffalo Bill (William Frederick Cody)
... are tuning up: Scraping of crystal bows, picking of strings!—Hush! Let the footlights now leap into brightness, for at a signal from their little leader the crickets' orchestra have briskly ...
— Chantecler - Play in Four Acts • Edmond Rostand
... in front of the potter's hut. On the right from the middle of the back of the scene to the footlights, the walls of the dwelling made of beaten clay. Two unequal doors. The wall is slightly raised supporting a terrace where pottery of all kinds is drying in the sun. Left, a wall of loose stones high enough to lean on. Between the wall and the ...
— Woman on Her Own, False Gods & The Red Robe - Three Plays By Brieux • Eugene Brieux
... procession of official Romans,—lictors and swordsmen, and the heralds announcing the day's business. Demas appears, dragged along with vicious jerks to execution. The Saviour follows, and falls under the weight of the cross before the footlights. Another long and dreary scene takes place, of brutalities from the Roman soldiers, the ringleader of whom is a sanguinary Andalusian ingeniously encased in a tin barrel, a hundred lines of rhymed sorrow ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... Englishman, of the normally healthy type, a sportsman, a good fellow, and a man of breeding—and Saton, this strange product of strange circumstances, externally passable enough, but with something about him which seemed, even in that clear November sunshine, to suggest the footlights. ...
— The Moving Finger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... (adv.) anywhere awhile baseball billboard bipartizan bondholder carload classmate corespondent downstairs everyday (a.) everyone fireproof football footlights footpad gateman holdup inasmuch infield ironclad juryman landlady lawsuit letterhead linesman midnight misprint misspell nevertheless newcomer nonunion northeast northwest Oddfellows officeholder oneself outfield pallbearer paymaster postcard posthaste postmaster ...
— News Writing - The Gathering , Handling and Writing of News Stories • M. Lyle Spencer
... remarked in passing, has arrived late) during the last ten minutes of a performance. No sooner do they discover that the end is drawing near than people begin to struggle into their wraps. By the time the players have lined up before the footlights the house ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... and a dull night. Navy Estimates been talked round for nearly five hours. SQUIRE of MALWOOD meekly hoped that a Vote would now be taken; DICKY TEMPLE presented himself at footlights with bewitching smile on his lips and elegantly bound gilt-edged volume under his arm; bowed to audience; opened volume; proceeding to offer few remarks when SQUIRE swooped down on ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, March 25, 1893 • Various
... figures he introduces, of the variety and occasional exaggeration of his dialogues and his situations, have been peculiarly difficult of adaptation to theatrical purposes. Nevertheless the world laughed and cried over Micawber, Captain Cuttle, Dan'l Peggotty, and Caleb Plummer, behind the footlights, years after Dolly Spanker, Aminadab Sleek, Timothy Toodles, Alfred Evelyn, and Geoffrey Dalk, their contemporaries in the standard and legitimate drama, created solely and particularly for dramatic representation, were absolutely forgotten. And Sir Henry Irving, sixty years after the ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... expression that was beyond either astonishment or alarm. She looked up; he looked down. It was a picture in a nightmare, and the candle, stuck in the sand close to the hole, threw upon it the glare of impromptu footlights. ...
— Three John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... talented actor, suddenly lost his voice, by the return of an old throat affection. He had just been "cast" for an important part in a new play, but had to give it up, as he could not speak distinctly enough to be heard across the footlights. ...
— The Moving Picture Girls Snowbound - Or, The Proof on the Film • Laura Lee Hope
... muttered, "and I was figuring that if I hung round here a week or so and played my hand all right, I'd maybe get her to do a few steps for me in the parlor. Oh, Lordy! And now I got a chance to see her before the footlights and size up her ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... father always loved the theatre, though perhaps the Green Room better than the footlights. The marked passages in his library still attest his propensity. He now looked about him with a keen appreciation, as though my words were all that he required to round out his evening. Like a man whose work is finished, and who is pleasantly fatigued ...
— The Unspeakable Gentleman • John P. Marquand
... Ober-Ammergau. It is the one thing of its kind on earth, and the nearest to an absolutely perfect thing I ever saw. A great charm is the unconsciousness of the performers. They do not play to an audience. There are no footlights, nothing theatrical; only the Great Tragedy wrought out as a living reality. I think of all the scenes; the one that made the deepest impression upon me was the one in which there were the fewest actors and least acting. ...
— Memories of Jane Cunningham Croly, "Jenny June" • Various
... from people that had not heard the preliminary announcement, and whose demonstration was intended for Renshaw, rather disconcerted Mogley. Then, ere he had spoken a word, or his eyes had ranged over the hazy lighted theatre on the other side of the footlights, there sounded in the ...
— Tales From Bohemia • Robert Neilson Stephens
... been acted more than once, and by different groups of people; sometimes on a stage equipped with footlights, curtain, and scenery; sometimes with barely any of these aids. Practical suggestions as to costumes, scenery, and some simple scenic effects will be found at the end ...
— The Christmas Dinner • Shepherd Knapp
... familiar: there are people for whom—taken though they may have been from the most secluded corner of the earth, unprepared, undisciplined, unwarned, the great world, the glitter of its footlights, the shock of its tournaments, the cruelty of its victories, the coldness of its neglect, have absolutely no terrors. They face it superbly, as one should face a mob, and the great world, like any proper mob, licks their feet and fawns on ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... arch was but dimly lighted, draughty, odorous, and gloomy. Beyond the extinguished footlights they could see the curved enormous cavern of the house, row upon row of empty seats. In the orchestra box two or three men, one in his coat sleeves, were disputing over an opera score. High up in the topmost gallery some one was experimenting with the calcium machine; a fan of light ...
— The Story Of Julia Page - Works of Kathleen Norris, Volume V. • Kathleen Norris
... conceived of rather as a struggle with the proletariat. Hillar, the producer, has effectually disenchanted the footlights by putting steps down to the audience in the position of the prompter's box. The characters frequently make their entrances as it were from the body of the audience. This is especially striking in the crowding up of the Roman Bolsheviks on to the stage in the opening scene—a remarkable ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... down the centre of the stage to the lowered footlights and looked about her, first at the orchestra, then around and up at the darkened house that was looking intently at her—a small ill-clad human, a spiritual entity, the only reality in this artificial setting. ...
— Flamsted quarries • Mary E. Waller
... through on those lines if she'd been obliged to play Jim Beckett's broken-hearted fiancee. But to do the siren with your brother—no, she wouldn't be equal to that, even to please me: couldn't get it across the footlights. I had to win her to Brian as well as win Brian to me. I hope you don't mind my calling him by his Christian ...
— Everyman's Land • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... not understand because they had missed the first five minutes of the play. Emmy could not tell that the actor was only pretending to be an American; she could not understand why, having spoken twenty words, he must take six paces farther from the footlights until he had spoken thirteen more; but she could and did feel most overwhelmingly exuberant at being as it were alone in that half-silent multitude, sitting beside Alf, their arms touching, her head whirling, her heart beating, ...
— Nocturne • Frank Swinnerton
... their hats. The promenade was as gay as on Fifth Avenue. Doctor Argyle gave his arm to Mrs. Harris, Lucille walked between Alfonso and Leo, and doctors of divinity and men of repute in other professions kept faithful step. Actors and actresses moved as gracefully as before the footlights. A famous actor carried on his shoulders a tiny girl who had bits of sky for eyes, a fair face, and fleecy hair that floated in the sea breeze, making ...
— The Harris-Ingram Experiment • Charles E. Bolton
... goddess she looked; and after the mincing shepherdesses and their artificial, conventional mannerisms, this woman came as a breath from Nature's grandeur, young, forceful, untrammelled. She came right down to the half-lit footlights, and stood motionless during a bar or two of the music. And then she sang, and the audience, tittering curiously before, remained spellbound, awe-struck, as the first notes of that matchless voice smote upon their hearing. She sang of the sadness ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... less universal "Manon Lescaut." There is a certain artificial, genuinely artificial, kind of nature in it: if not "true to life," it is true to certain lives. But the play lets go this hold, such as it is, on reality, and becomes a mere stage convention as it crosses the footlights; a convention which is touching, indeed, far too full of pathos, human in its exaggerated way, but no longer to be mistaken, by the least sensitive of hearers, for great or even fine literature. ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... footlights to "sidewalk", is a large white plaster arch, gayly decorated with the ...
— A Parody Outline of History • Donald Ogden Stewart
... Queen pause at the footlights.> Both Leaders: You shall feel goads no more. <They walk backward, throwing off the yoke and rejoicing.> Walk dreadful roads no more, Free from your loads For ...
— Chinese Nightingale • Vachel Lindsay
... the other on the left, holding the palm or the crown to be placed on the pedestal of Moliere's bust. My turn came, and I advanced alone. I felt that I was pale and then livid, with a will that was determined to conquer. I went forward slowly towards the footlights, but instead of bowing as my comrades had done, I stood up erect and gazed with my two eyes into all the eyes turning towards me, I had been warned of the battle, and I did not wish to provoke it, but I would not fly from it. I waited a second, and I felt the thrill ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt
... of the passions was different from that which obtained with a Sacramento audience; but it was certain that her charming presence, so effective at short range, was not sufficiently pronounced for the footlights. She had admirers enough in the green-room, but awakened no abiding affection among the audience. In this strait, it occurred to her that she had a voice,—a contralto of no very great compass or cultivation, but singularly sweet and touching; and ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... place. Digression and want of method and order are traditional national sins. Fancy introducing an essay on how to live on nothing a year as Thackeray did in "Vanity Fair," or sandwiching in a ghost story as Dickens has dared to do. As well might a dramatic author rush up to the footlights and begin telling anecdotes while his play was suspending its action and his characters waiting wearily behind him. It is all wrong, though every great name can be quoted in support of it. Our sense of form is lamentably lacking, and Sir Walter sinned with the rest. But get past ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... next appeared, with his coat on. The situation certainly did not look inviting. The lantern on the ground threw up a pallid glow on the severe face of the commander, as the footlights might illuminate the figure of a brigand in a wood on the stage. The face of the officer showed that he was greatly impressed with the importance and danger of his position. Yates glanced about him with a smile, ...
— In the Midst of Alarms • Robert Barr
... merriment. The lady went almost into hysterics, so violent were her paroxysms of mirth. In the midst of the clamour, Holloway, hearing these loud bursts of laughter at a time when there should be complete silence, rushed on to the stage, fancying something had gone wrong. Darting to the footlights, as well as his little fat figure would let him, he roared out, "What's all this here row about?" and glancing round to see on whom he could heap his vengeance, he caught sight of our two friends, and looking up indignantly at them, he continued—"I von't have no row in ...
— Recollections of Old Liverpool • A Nonagenarian
... where the jewels flash, The arching brow and the languid pose, The rare old lace and the subtle scents, The slender foot and the fingers frail,— I may act till the world grows wild and tense, But never a flush on your features pale. The footlights glimmer between us two,— You in the box and I on the boards,— I am only an actor, Madame, to you, A mimic king 'mid his mimic lords, For you are the belle of ...
— Flint and Feather • E. Pauline Johnson
... when in use. The map desk is really the home of underwriting, just as the stage is of the drama. And just as there are stage conventions, certain things which are taken for granted, such as the idea that a character on the stage cannot escape over the footlights into the audience—that there is an imaginary blank wall between the audience and the players—so we have our conventions and symbols in the maps." He called for Boston One, which the map clerk laid instantly open at his elbow. It was a large volume bound in gray canvas, perhaps two by three ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble |
