last evening so often prove to have soured on you overnight when you open them at the office the next day.
For five years I worked for Colonel McCaull without a rest. We played fifty-two weeks a season, twenty-two in New York City and thirty on the road. In ten years, in fact, I had just two weeks vacation. Opera bouffe, light opera, operetta or comic opera, as you will, was in its hey-day. Musical comedy and the revue were yet unborn. In numbers and importance light opera ranked second only to the drama itself. Musically the United States had produced little of its own beyond Stephen Foster's negro songs, and we imported virtually all of our light operas from Austria, Germany and France, with the notable exception—Gilbert and Sullivan, who had just burst upon a delighted world. One McCaull company headed by Digby Bell was singing Gilbert and Sullivan and paying the authors' royalties; half a dozen other troupes were pirating the same.
The European flavor of light opera was, no doubt, one of its weaknesses in America and an explanation of why it had been all but driven from our stage by musical comedy fifteen years later. The former was purely romantic and
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