"Footlights" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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
... 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
... setting. I do not believe I saw it. All I remember was Chenal standing at the top of a short flight of steps, in the centre near the back drop. I indistinctly remember that the rest of the stage was filled with the soldier chorus and that near the footlights on either side were clusters of ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... theatre. "He's a switchman and I'm agoin' to fix up the attic fer him. I don't jest see how we air 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 exigency was ...
— Amarilly of Clothes-line Alley • Belle K. Maniates
... question," he said; "it tells me we are as good friends again as ever. The fact is, the sight of the congregation, when I get into the pulpit, has the same effect upon me that the sight of the footlights has on an actor. All oratory (though my clerical brethren are shy of confessing it) is acting—without the scenery and the costumes. Did you really mean it, last night, when you said you would like to ...
— I Say No • Wilkie Collins
... resigned both; fell out with the Consuls on details; and is now, as we are advised, seeking to resile from his resignations. Such an official I never remember to have read of, though I have seen the like, from across the footlights and the orchestra, evolving in similar figures ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... "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 ...
— The Torrent - Entre Naranjos • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... the actors, when called before the curtain at the close of the play, how they pass before it one by one, and perhaps joining hands make their bows in line, to all appearance, on a very narrow platform. The curtain is your background, while the footlights may stand for the surface of your wood. In illustration of this principle, let me call your attention to the arrangement of the animals in Plate VI, where economy of space, and a desire to display each detail to advantage, are the leading ...
— Wood-Carving - Design and Workmanship • George Jack
... safety vault crowd guessin' as to what kind of a prize the Van Urbans had won, but it didn't feaze her a bit. She just gave 'em the Horse Show stare, as cool as a mint frappe. The ringin' up of the curtain didn't disturb her any, either. When a chesty baritone sauntered down toward the footlights and began callin' the chorus names she glanced over her shoulder, casual like, just to see what the row was all about, and then went on sizin' up the folks in the boxes. She couldn't have done it better if she'd taken ...
— Shorty McCabe • Sewell Ford
... 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 ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... carnival of life, the most celebrated were Maria Riquelme, Francisca Beson, Josefa Vaca, and Maria Calderon, familiarly known to the theatre-goers as la bella Calderona. Philip IV., as much infatuated as the meanest of his subjects by the glitter of the footlights, never lost an opportunity when at his capital to spend his evenings in the royal box, where he showed his appreciation by most generous applause; and he was soon on familiar terms with many of the reigning ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... sp'ile the story by discountin' the sequil. Wa'al, putty soon the band struck up some kind of a dancin' tune, an' the curt'in went up, an' a girl come prancin' down to the footlights an' begun singin' an' dancin', an', scat my ——! to all human appearances you c'd 'a' covered ev'ry dum thing she had on with a postage stamp." John stole a glance at Mrs. Cullom. She was staring at the speaker with wide-open eyes ...
— David Harum - A Story of American Life • Edward Noyes Westcott
... and 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
... 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 ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... there. I have seen turns which have sent other houses into one convulsive fit, but at this hall the audience has sat immovable and colourless while the performers wasted themselves in furious efforts to get over the footlights. At the Oxford, however, the audience is always "with you," and this atmosphere gets behind and puts the artists, in their turn, on the top of their form. The result is a sparkling ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... the worse, of course, for the admission; but no one, no one could guess what he was at home. She had heard of great men who were always giving gala performances in public, but whose wives and daughters saw only the empty theatre, with the footlights out and the scenery stacked in the wings; but with him it was just the other way: wonderful as he was in public, in society, she sometimes felt he wasn't doing himself justice—he was so much more wonderful at home. It was like carrying a guilty secret about with her: ...
— The Greater Inclination • Edith Wharton
... 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 ...
— Rose in Bloom - A Sequel to "Eight Cousins" • Louisa May Alcott
... shop, or run tea-rooms, or bred pet dogs, become a mannequin, or a dance club hostess, or even "gone on the films." But none of these avenues to feminine employment existed in the eighteen-forties. Hence, it was the footlights or nothing. ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... 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
... 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. ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... the footlights, and turning her looks toward the royal box, and bowing low, sang the words: "Comme faime la reine, comme j'aime ...
— Marie Antoinette And Her Son • Louise Muhlbach
... find no vent in the effervescence of passionate verbal outbreaks, and outside the charmed precincts of the tragic stage, the world would not tolerate the raving Hamlets and Othellos, the Macbeths and Medeas, that scowl and storm and anathematize so successfully in the magic glow of the footlights. ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... comb, manicure, and luxuriously clothe a body than it is to renovate a soul, and within the Violet Maggie dwelt in all her gutter vigor. It is also safe to say that perhaps it was no little part of the Maggie that the beautiful and haughty Violet threw across the footlights to draw to her the primitive in the hearts of her vast audiences. It was to some extent the wisdom of Maggie that the Violet was using as she prepared for her first encounter alone with Mr. Dennis Farraday as he raced down ...
— Blue-grass and Broadway • Maria Thompson Daviess
... 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 ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... present their personages to the public and to posterity as actors upon a stage,—I was about to say as puppets in a show,—whose acts are quite outside of themselves, and whose voices express emotions not their own. They appear before the footlights of a fulfilled destiny; and their doubts, their weaknesses, are concealed, along with their temptations, beneath the paint and stage drapery lent them by the historian who, knowing beforehand the denouement toward which their efforts tended, unconsciously assumes a like ...
— Maximilian in Mexico - A Woman's Reminiscences of the French Intervention 1862-1867 • Sara Yorke Stevenson
... his scheme to Fitts as soon as he gets it worked out, with the idea of having our prize little architect provide for a stage with ecclesiastical props in the shape of pulpits and chancels and so forth, which can be removed on short notice. Suggests, as a matter of thrift, that footlights be put in instead of altar candles. Free show, free acting, no advertising bills, no royalties to authors, ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon
... in manuscript, and imperfectly committed to memory. He laid it down on a little table at the back of the stage (returning to it occasionally to refresh his memory), and then, in a very natural and matter-of-fact way, walked to the footlights, and, looking the audience frankly in the eyes, began without an instant's hesitation, and in a voice precisely as if he were talking ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... Illyria; and in the great drawing-room—which they entered while John persuaded the King to a seat—they found many rows of morocco-covered chairs, a miniature stage with a drop representing the play-scene in Hamlet, a row of footlights, a boudoir-grand piano, and a man seated at the keyboard whom they recognised as a performer in much ...
— The White Wolf and Other Fireside Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... artist Nero 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
... years at King's was—imprimis, a cricket blue, including a rather lucky eighty-three at Lord's; secondly, a very poor degree; thirdly and lastly, a taste for literature and the drama—he had been a prominent member of the Footlights Club. When he came down he looked about him for some occupation which should combine in happy proportions a small amount of work and a large amount of salary, and, finding none, drifted into journalism, at which calling he had been doing ...
— The Head of Kay's • P. G. Wodehouse
... crippled woman was wheeled into the tent and brought right down to the foot of the platform. The subject was The University of Hard Knocks. Presently the cripple's face was shining brighter than the footlights. ...
— The University of Hard Knocks • Ralph Parlette
... rumble from Alvina's piano. This is the storm from whence the rainbow emerges. Up goes the curtain—Miss Poppy twirling till her skirts lift as in a breeze, rise up and become a rainbow above her now darkened legs. The footlights are all but extinguished. Miss Poppy is all but ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... them, too. 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 ...
— The Swoop! or How Clarence Saved England - A Tale of the Great Invasion • P. G. Wodehouse
... 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
... made them think he was sleepy. Major Pond, having lived much with orators, and thinking the trick easy, tried oratory on his own account, and succeeded as well as did Matthew Arnold. No one ever heard Major Pond: his voice fell over the footlights, dead, into the orchestra; only those with opera-glasses knew ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... sat, known, watched, a notoriety, the card who had raised Pilgrim to the skies, probably the only theatrical proprietor in the crowded and silent audience; and he was expecting anxiously to see Elsie April again—across the footlights! He had not seen her since the night of the stone-laying, over a week earlier. He had not sought to see her. He had listened then to the delicate tones of her weak, whispering, thrilling voice, and had expressed regret for Rose ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett
... 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. And the sentiment in it is not ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... pretentious. Your idealist can see no beauty in sober fact, but must array it in all the theatrical properties of a vulgar imagination; he must give to things more imposing proportions, he colours gaudily; Nature for him is ever posturing in the full glare of footlights. Really he stands on no higher level than the housemaid who sees in every woman a duchess in black velvet, an Aubrey Plantagenet in plain John Smith. So I, in common with many another traveller, expected to ...
— The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia • William Somerset Maugham
... by dozens of people as he stood before the footlights and brandished his dagger; but his swift horse quickly carried him beyond any haphazard pursuit. He crossed the Navy-Yard bridge and rode into Maryland, being joined very soon by Herold. The assassin and his wretched acolyte came at midnight ...
— A Short Life of Abraham Lincoln - Condensed from Nicolay & Hay's Abraham Lincoln: A History • John G. Nicolay
... Mary Carew with tears of relief, and the prima donna with good-natured readiness stepped upon the stage, lifted the now frightened child who, at the noise, had sprung up in alarm, and carried her out to the footlights, the other children peeping, but too well drilled, poor dears, to otherwise ...
— The Angel of the Tenement • George Madden Martin
... for stepping from the churches to the footlights, is not without its logic, in these days. "People go to the theatres more than they do the churches," she says, "and I want to go where there are plenty of people to hear me, and where they ...
— The Use and Need of the Life of Carry A. Nation • Carry A. Nation
... sense of humour. I had preserved it intact as 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 ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin
... Compliments, double-barreled and double-charged, were paid to Brunner (who pretended to understand nothing); to Cecile, on whom nothing was lost; and to the Presidente, who fished for them. Pons heard the blood singing in his ears, the light of all the blazing gas-jets of the theatre footlights seemed to be dazzling his eyes, when Cecile, in a low voice and with the most ingenious circumspection, spoke of her father's plan of the annuity of twelve hundred francs. The old artist positively declined the offer, bringing forward the ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... which reinforce the vivid reproduction of ideas, and check action, stifle those emotions directed toward the players, the objective emotions of which we have spoken. The spectator is completely cut off from all possibilities of influence on events. Between his world and that across the footlights an inexpressible gulf is fixed. He cannot take an "attitude," he can have nothing to do in this galere. Since he may not act, even those beginnings of action which make the basis of emotion are inhibited in him. The spectator at a play experiences much more ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer
... she could 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
... dreadful creatures if one believes all one hears about them smoking cigarettes and stealing young boys out of college. That was before she knew of my late lamented past. She has been perfectly lovely to me since, however, and I believe she is pleasantly excited by my 'gossip of the footlights,' as she calls it. She asked me the other day if it is true that chorus girls are more sinned ...
— Mr. Bingle • George Barr McCutcheon
... remember that I am the favourite of the crust." Moreover, if an author set himself to invent the naif things that children might do in their Christmas plays at home, he would hardly light upon the device of the little troupe who, having no footlights, arranged upon the floor a ...
— The Children • Alice Meynell
... o 'clock when a very tired Loyalheart went forth on a pilgrimage to Wayne Hall, accompanied by her equally loyal supporters, who were proudly bearing numerous floral offerings which had been handed to Grace over the footlights. ...
— Grace Harlowe's Fourth Year at Overton College • Jessie Graham Flower
... behind them, there came into view upstage a squad of little white-clad female naval officers, each, according to my recollection, carrying the Stars and Stripes. As these marched forward and deployed as skirmishers before the footlights, the orchestra struck up "The Star-Spangled Banner," fortissimo, and with a liberal sounding of the brasses. Upon this appeared at the back a counterfeit President of the United States, guarded on either side by a female militia—or were they perhaps secret-service agents?—in striking ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... figure wore out before I had anything more to show, and I wasn't big enough to make better terms with the manager. They kept me nearly a year doing chambermaids and fairy queens the other side of the footlights, where I saw you today. Then I kicked! I suppose I might have married some fool for his money, but I was soft enough to think you might be sending for me when you were safe. You seem to be mighty comfortable ...
— Openings in the Old Trail • Bret Harte
... of the stage; it gave her figure a setting of colour which made it more pure and salient. She moved freely in her exposed isolation, yet with great sobriety of gesture; there was no table in front of her, and she had no notes in her hand, but stood there like an actress before the footlights, or a singer spinning vocal sounds to a silver thread. There was such a risk that a slim provincial girl, pretending to fascinate a couple of hundred blase New Yorkers by simply giving them her ideas, would fail of her effect, that at the end of ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. II (of II) • Henry James
... been a great theatre-goer," says Field in his "Auto-Analysis." And it may be doubted if any writer of our time repaid the stage as generously for the pleasure he received from those who walked its boards before and behind the footlights. No better analysis of his relations to the profession has been made than that from the pen ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... duty,—by the same spirit, in fact, which had compelled Drake to court-martial Gorley in Africa, and subsequently to detail the episode to her. Duty was to keep them apart. She came to think of duty as a row of footlights across which they could from time to time look into each ...
— The Philanderers • A.E.W. Mason
... glory of these places had not yet been dimmed by any general popular disapproval. The gambling halls were not only places to risk one's fortune, but they were also a sort of evening club. They usually supported a raised stage with footlights, a negro minstrel troop, or a singer or so. On one side elaborate bars of rosewood or mahogany ran the entire length, backed by big mirrors of French plate. The whole of the very large main floor was ...
— The Forty-Niners - A Chronicle of the California Trail and El Dorado • Stewart Edward White
... when "The Spy" was before the footlights in Lafayette Theatre, on Broadway, near Canal Street, Enoch Crosby, the supposed original spy, appeared in a box with friends, and "was given thunders of applause." From "Portraits of Cooper's Heroines," ...
— James Fenimore Cooper • Mary E. Phillips
... 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
... what that attitude should be depends, not on rules, but on the spirit of the speech and the occasion. Senator La Follette stood for three hours with his weight thrown on his forward foot as he leaned out over the footlights, ran his fingers through his hair, and flamed out a denunciation of the trusts. It was very effective. But imagine a speaker taking that kind of position to discourse on the development of road-making machinery. If you have ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... revising his play to suit either: a) Jones, who can sing and dance, but is not funny; b) Smith, who is funny, but cannot sing and dance; c) Brown, who is funny and can sing and dance, but who cannot carry a love-interest and, through working in revue, has developed a habit of wandering down to the footlights and chatting with the audience. Whichever actor is given the ...
— A Wodehouse Miscellany - Articles & Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... apart from the stage, or, in a few instances, because of their own folly and indiscretions. The stage world is a happy world in the main. Its rewards are abundant in friendships as well as in cash, and the happiness radiated to you from behind the footlights is the direct result of the happiness that permeates the very being of the smiling favorite of the gods whose efforts to please you have met with your approbation. So the pleasure of dancer and spectator are in a degree mutual, which in great measure explains the fascination ...
— The Art of Stage Dancing - The Story of a Beautiful and Profitable Profession • Ned Wayburn
... I have been informed that in the days before you ruined my father's life you were an actress in a second-class London playhouse, and I see you have not yet lost some little tricks of the stage; but we are not now before the footlights, and it will be much better to lay aside everything pertaining to them. Nothing that you have said has awakened my pity or touched my sympathies for you; in fact, what you have told me has only steeled my heart against you because of its utter falsity. It is unnecessary to go over the ground ...
— That Mainwaring Affair • Maynard Barbour
... Bird Room presented a fine appearance. One end was curtained off with red drapery; and real footlights, with tin shades, gave a truly theatrical air to the little stage. Rows of chairs, filled with mammas and little people, occupied the rest of the space. The hall and Frank's room were full of amused papas, uncles, and old gentlemen whose patriotism brought them out in spite of rheumatism. ...
— Jack and Jill • Louisa May Alcott
... is no less offensive than his manner of laying loving hands on my person. As a rule, he treats me like a third-row dancing girl that goes to petition the manager for a place nearer the footlights. There is no limit to his familiarities or to the license of his conversation. "Fine wench" is a term of affection he likes to bestow on his future queen; indeed, one of the less gross. He has the weakness to like epithets that, I am told, gentlemen sometimes use in their clubs, but never towards ...
— Secret Memoirs: The Story of Louise, Crown Princess • Henry W. Fischer
... put up at the end of Mme. Mauperin's drawing-room, and a leafy screen, made of branches of pine and flowering shrubs, hid the footlights from view. Renee, with the help of her drawing-master, had painted the drop-scene, which looked something like the banks of the Seine. On each side of the stage was a hand-painted ...
— Rene Mauperin • Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt
... lost. I enter at the prescribed door, and find myself close to my appointed place. Every one—such is the admirable arrangement—seems to do likewise. In a few minutes about one thousand persons are seated without confusion. The theater is darkened, the footlights are ...
— Parsifal - Story and Analysis of Wagner's Great Opera • H. R. Haweis
... the door. At last, in desperation, he resolved to storm the 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 effect that, before he could ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... the palace at Fiori, extremely crowded with restless and expectant people. The crowd is arranged on both sides of the stage, in such a way that a broad avenue is left in the middle, leading from the footlights to the back of the stage and gradually narrowing to a point at Beatrice's throne. On the extreme right and left of the stage, along the back of the crowd, stands the guard, a large body of armed soldiers, at attention, ...
— The Lamp and the Bell • Edna St. Vincent Millay
... saw, as I would have guessed, no one whom I knew in the eager, stamping little audience. In their midst I lost the slim figure that had preceded me, until she mounted the platform and swept before the footlights a ...
— Friendship Village • Zona Gale
... commences knocking off the cover of the box. He pulls the cover off, and up jumps the obedient slave and his wife! The obedient slave and his dear Julia fall out of the box. Great applause. They rush to the footlights and kneel. Quick music by the orchestra, in which the bass drum don't warble so much as she did. "I'm free! I'M FREE! I'M FREE!!" shrieks the obedient slave, "O I'm free!" The stage is suddenly lighted up in a gorgeous manner. The obedient ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 1 • Charles Farrar Browne
... of him? Mortimer Farwell is—or was—the most popular matinee idol on the stage. He's resting on his laurels at present, but I don't think he will rest long. Between you and me, he misses the footlights." ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... and his last good work," a poem which was once in high repute, and is less, if at all, in favour to-day, being written in a mood which is a strain upon the reader; it is "a little too declamatory," says Professor Saintsbury, "a little too suggestive of soliloquies in an inky cloak, with footlights in front"; his "Revenge," acted in 1721, is pronounced by the professor to be "perhaps the very last example of an acting tragedy of real literary merit"; his satires in the "Love of Fame; or, The Universal Passion," almost equalled those of Pope, and brought him both fame and fortune; he took ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... Just before the overthrow, the line is projected upon the screen: "He hath loosed the fateful lightning of his terrible swift sword." Then the heavenly host becomes gradually visible upon the air, marching toward the audience, almost crossing the footlights, and blowing their solemn trumpets. With this picture the line is given us to read: "Our God is marching on." This host appears in the photoplay as often as the refrain sweeps into the poem. The celestial company, its imperceptible emergence, its spiritual power ...
— The Art Of The Moving Picture • Vachel Lindsay
... 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
... the girls were tiptoeing, with their hands on the shoulders of the men, and making futile little leaps into the air to get a better view, and others were resting on one knee that those behind might see over their shoulders. There were over a dozen children before the footlights, with the prima donna in the centre. She was singing the verses of a song, and they were following her movements, and joining in the chorus with high piping voices. They seemed entirely too much at home and too self-conscious to please Van Bibber; but there was one exception. ...
— Van Bibber and Others • Richard Harding Davis
... between two curtains. Then he found himself in a low square room, and could see about him again by the subdued light of oil lamps fixed against the wall. At one end was the small stage, its scarlet curtain now down; in front a row of tin lamps, primitive footlights, and the rest of the room was filled with rows of empty chairs. Mechanically and without interest, Hamilton went forward and seated himself in the first of these rows. The tom-toms had ceased: there was quiet, an interval of rest presumably ...
— Six Women • Victoria Cross
... London in 1894; and it 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
... 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 were English of a more dubious ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... big white sheet, on which the moving pictures were shown, stood back some distance from the front of the stage. And it was a real stage, with footlights and all, but it was not used for acting any more, as only moving pictures were given in ...
— Bunny Brown and his Sister Sue • Laura Lee Hope
... page, and his style is as extravagant as his imagery. Sometimes he uses a short, staccato sentence to enforce his point, but more often we are engulfed in a swirling welter of words. He delights in the declamatory language of the stage, and all his characters speak as if they were behind the footlights, shouting ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... 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
... less fantastic and bizarre than those of their mothers, and command the services of maids from their earliest years; they are taken to the theater and the hippodrome, and for the natural pleasures of childhood are given the excitement of the footlights and ...
— The "Goldfish" • Arthur Train
... even, within limits, the battering ram, would have, I feel confident, comparatively few terrors for me. But missiles I abominate. Drawing, as I am bound to do, my anticipations of the tented field from experience gathered—I say it literally, gathered—before the footlights, I confess to some sympathy with the gentleman who assured Harry Percy that but for these vile guns he would himself have been a soldier. You will not misunderstand me. I believe on my faith that as a military man ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... ten, 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
... refreshing lines our plan of campaign was gradually developed and elaborated into that finished study on which Raffles would rely like any artist of the footlights. None were more capable than he of coping with the occasion as it rose, of rising himself with the emergency of the moment, of snatching a victory from the very dust of defeat. Yet, for choice, every detail was premeditated, ...
— A Thief in the Night • E. W. Hornung
... accents still, His name still flaunted on the evening's bill. Heroes, the monarchs of the scenic floor, Had died in earnest and were heard no more; Beauties, whose cheeks such roseate bloom o'er-spread They faced the footlights in unborrowed red, Had faded slowly through successive shades To gray duennas, foils of younger maids; Sweet voices lost the melting tones that start With Southern throbs the sturdy Saxon heart, While fresh sopranos shook the ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... Here, cited before us, are the actual figures in the actual story that has been told to us. Here they are, not as images to be evoked through the medium of printed page, or of painted canvas, or of disinterested ladies and gentlemen behind footlights. Actual, authentic, they stand before us, one by one, in the harsh light of day, to be made to reveal all that we need ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... warbler walks rapidly about, looking for insects under the fallen leaves, and poking his inquisitive beak into every cranny where a spider may be lurking. The bird has a pretty, conscious way of flying up to a perch, a few feet above the ground, as a tenor might advance towards the footlights of a stage, to pour forth his clear, penetrating whistle, that in the nesting season especially is repeated over, and over again ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... popular favor and success. The 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
... whose new conduct was paucity of love stories. Such improvident neglect was in keeping with my altering view of women, a view accorded to me by self-dissipation of the glamour through which they had been wont to appear. I had wandered somehow behind the scenes, and beheld, no footlights of sex intervening, the once so radiant fairies resolved into a raddled humanity, as likable as ever, but ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... tobacco, for the men to smoke, and saucers full of snuff for both men and women. A great paraffin lamp threw broad, opaque shadows, making the whole a strange blur in the kitchen, while in the bedroom opening off it, where the tense, dead woman lay, was a glare of candles as from footlights, and there gathered the old women of the neighborhood, discussing everything in hushed, vindictive whispers—the price of cows, morbid diseases, the new wife some man had, and whether such a girl was with child.... And the ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... illustration of a maxim of Dante Rossetti to the effect that artists had nothing to do with morality. She was always on the stage—in the most familiar act and in the presence of strangers she never lost sight of the footlights, and the best acting I ever saw her in was in private and in the representation of some comedy or tragedy of her own interests. She played with a marvelous power one part, and all others were but variations of ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... peer into the dim past that haunts the scenes of my childhood in Aberdeen, Scotland, a thousand memories troop by like the scenes of a panorama with the footlights turned low; and when I contemplate them in a meditative hour it leaves me with as lonesome a feeling as if I had listened to the old time song, "Home Sweet Home," which I have heard a thousand times in distant climes, sometimes sung to crowded audiences ...
— Where Strongest Tide Winds Blew • Robert McReynolds
... its termination amid thunders of applause, which, as the curtain finally descended on the last scene of the last act, became perfectly deafening, accompanied by cries for the author. But no author appeared behind the footlights or in the proscenium box; and, at last, the uproar becoming redoubled, the manager came forward, and, in the author's behalf, tendered grateful acknowledgments for the unprecedented favor, even by a Parisian audience, ...
— Edmond Dantes • Edmund Flagg
... of 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
... a jackass half the time. I can't get away from the glamour of the footlights. I'm no Johnny; you know that. No hanging round stage-entrances and buying wine and diamonds. I might be reckless enough to buy a bunch of roses, when I'm not broke. But I like 'em, the bright ones. They keep a fellow amused. Most of 'em speak good English ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... is connected with the light-life of large cities. Club acquaintances of his in London had from time to time married into the Gaiety Chorus, and Mr. Carmyle, though he had no objection to the Gaiety Chorus in its proper place—on the other side of the footlights—had always looked on these young men after as social outcasts. The fine dashing frenzy which had brought him all the way from South Audley Street to win ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse
... 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 Christmas Dinner • Shepherd Knapp
... slowly down the gallery, keeping his face to the tapestries, like an actor playing to the footlights. ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... Milly would have said I really cannot say, for just then there was a soft clapping of hands, and La Narda came down the crimson steps of the Justice Room, and advanced to the footlights. ...
— Fifty-Two Stories For Girls • Various
... 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 Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... Still, even such weather could not spoil 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. That was the Garden of Gethsemane. ...
— Memories of Jane Cunningham Croly, "Jenny June" • Various
... the wife of Mr. William Hunter Grimston, there are many who still know and speak of her by her happily-remembered maiden name. From that day husband and wife have never played apart—they have remained sweethearts on the stage and lovers in their own home. At night—the footlights; by day—home and children. Mrs. Kendal assured me that neither her eldest daughter, Margaret, nor Ethel, nor Dorothy—the youngest—nor "Dorrie," who is now at Cambridge, nor Harold, a "Marlborough" boy, would ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 27, March 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... man in all history with whom you may compare Rajah Brooke. His career was the score of a hero of the footlights or of the dime novel rather than the life of an actual history-maker in this prosaic nineteenth century. What is true of him is also true in a less degree of his famous nephew and successor, Sir Charles Brooke, G. C. M. C., the ...
— Tales of the Malayan Coast - From Penang to the Philippines • Rounsevelle Wildman
... dreams of ordinary stage settings—and at the same time makes possible the quick transitions that are the glory of the Elizabethan drama. Here, of course, is where we make connection with the moving picture, whose fascinating realism and freedom from the taint of the footlights have perhaps been sufficiently insisted upon in what has been already said. In the moving picture, with the possibility of realistic backgrounds such as no skill, no money, no opportunity could build ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... little old woman approaches, shriveled and smiling, in her faded furbelows now in rags. She sings in a piping voice and executes between the verses a tottering pas seul, her eyes ever smiling, as if she still saw over the glare of the footlights, in the haze beyond, the vast audience of by-gone days; smiling as if she still heard the big orchestra and saw the leader with his vibrant baton, watching her every movement. She is over seventy now, and was once a premier ...
— The Real Latin Quarter • F. Berkeley Smith
... had got Truedale's play over the footlights! He knew it; every one knew it. And when the climax came and the decision was made—leaving the man-who-had-learned-his-lesson unaware of the divine renunciation but strong enough to take up his life clear-sightedly; when the little heroine lifted her eyes and ...
— The Man Thou Gavest • Harriet T. Comstock
... great-eyed; a robust enchantress with a sweep to her manner. Her beauty was an exaggeration. Exaggerated contours, colors, features that needed perspective to set them off. Diluted by distance and bathed by the footlights she focused prettily into a Manon, a Thais, an Isolde. But in the room drinking tea she had the effect of a too startling close-up—a rococo siren ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... 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 flames with ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... had been provided were not, strictly speaking, press tables at all. They were ordinary unpainted kitchen tables, ranged two on one side and two on the other side at the front of the stage, close up to the old gas-tipped footlights; and when we came in by the back way that afternoon and found our appointed places I was struck by certain sinister facts. Usually women flocked to a state convention. By rights there should have been ladies in the boxes and in the balcony. Now there wasn't a woman in sight ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... here," said Lenore, advancing to the footlights, "and he doesn't know. It is not his fault. He's waiting for his cue. See, Mr. Delacour! Leave out that bit about the daisies, and ...
— The Lowest Rung - Together with The Hand on the Latch, St. Luke's Summer and The Understudy • Mary Cholmondeley
... individuals wandered, searching for 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 a ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson
... address his farewell to the departing lady. It had been a difficult task for him to obey my instructions, as he maintained that it was against all operatic custom for the singer not to address such an important passage straight to the public from the footlights. When in the course of the performance he seized his harp to begin the song, there was a cry from the audience, 'Ah! il prend encore sa harpe,' upon which there was a universal outburst of laughter followed by fresh whistling, ...
— My Life, Volume II • Richard Wagner
... 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 ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... and passing shadows over Mr. ROBERTS' own quaint humour which speedily reasserts itself, and, the Pettitt-and-Sims fetters being cast aside, the People's ARTHUR is himself again, and more so than ever. And, when he is himself, he is simply the most absurd person that ever faced the footlights. ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, March 26, 1892 • Various
... of fire and whilst others were escaping, Miss Kate Claxton with three other actors came bravely forward to the footlights uttering ...
— Home Lyrics • Hannah. S. Battersby
... Side 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 ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry
... before the death of Lafayette, when I was concentrating my whole mind on forthcoming events, I distinctly saw, in the crystal, a stage with a man standing before the footlights, either speaking or singing. In the midst of his performance, a black curtain suddenly fell, and I intuitively realised the theatre was on fire. The picture then faded away and was replaced by something of a totally different character. Again, just before the ...
— Byways of Ghost-Land • Elliott O'Donnell
... Mr. Miller and themselves. The seventh, a long-legged young man in faultlessly-fitting tweeds of English cut, seemed, on the other hand, not so much hurt as embarrassed. It was this youth who now stepped down to the darkened footlights and spoke in a remorseful ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... the audience was voiced by a torrent of bravos and handclappings that thundered until La Favorita, having thrown a long mantle about her, came out into the glare of the footlights. ...
— The Title Market • Emily Post
... much surprised to hear that the much-talked-of jewelry is sham. There is a vein of wisdom in the contessa, and we shall probably find she has put her jewelry into safe keeping, and wears paste because it has just as good an effect across the footlights. I should judge her wise enough not to take risks, and to have an eye for the future. It was only her superstition, and the fact that she wore the earrings fairly constantly, which prevented her depositing them in a safe place too. Zena ...
— The Master Detective - Being Some Further Investigations of Christopher Quarles • Percy James Brebner
... she was in reality as beautiful as she seemed, because no woman was quite so beautiful as that; most of it was undoubtedly due to rouge and rice-powder and the footlights; but one could not be mistaken about the voice. And if her speech was that, what must her singing be! I thought; and in the outcome I remembered this reflection best ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... them all and he was right. There surely is no end to the things he can devise for me to do. I long for the glamour and footlights of the gay white way, but I have been cast out and rejected as many a Show Girl ...
— Biltmore Oswald - The Diary of a Hapless Recruit • J. Thorne Smith, Jr.
... remember," 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
... serve as a stage, and in the auditorium he placed benches or chairs. There was, presumably, no room for a gallery; if such had been erected, the indignant More would certainly have mentioned it in his bill of complaints.[154] Chandeliers over the stage, and, possibly, footlights, completed the necessary arrangements. For these alterations Farrant, we are told, became "greatly indebted," and he died three or four years later with the debt still unpaid. More complained that the alterations had put the rooms into a state ...
— Shakespearean Playhouses - A History of English Theatres from the Beginnings to the Restoration • Joseph Quincy Adams
... unique. In a life 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 calmly waited. ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... 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 ...
— R. Holmes & Co. • John Kendrick Bangs
... day in, day oot, how I was pleasing you— the public. You make up my audiences. And—it is you who send the other audiences, that hae no heard me yet, to come to the theatre. To- morrow nicht's audience is in the making to-nicht. If you folk who are out in front the noo, beyond the glare of the footlights, dinna care for me, dinna like the way I'm trying to please you, and amuse you, there'll be empty seats in the hoose ...
— Between You and Me • Sir Harry Lauder
... the great power, the great motor, is the mass. The mass is made powerful by the added importance given to each individual. And you may trace without conceit a state of things behind the scenes very similar to this in front of the footlights. In the theatre, also, the many workers contribute to a grand result. The manager would be as powerless in his little empire, without important assistants, as a monarch without ministers and people. What makes the French army and the American so irresistible ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... through the hearts of your hearers like a vibration of music—this is to have transcended, this is to have justified yourself! And justified yourself to whom? To Sanderson? To the world? No! You have justified Harry Barnes to Harry Barnes! You carry this human throng over the footlights and into your soul with a Chinaman's queue and a putty nose. Your Art is still that fine, secure Art which you have carried in your memory as you traversed dingy stairways on Fourteenth Street. Barnes, you live, you act, ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, July 1908. • Various
... marching in serried ranks, uniformed and helmeted, stalwarts carrying torches and banners. And then there were the draughty opera-houses with the sylvan scenery pushed back and plush chairs and sofas pushed forward; with an ominous table, a pitcher of water on it and a glass, near the footlights. The houses were packed with more bewildered citizens. What a wonderful study of mob-psychology it would have offered! Men who had not thought of the grand old Republican party for two years, and who had not cared much about it when they had entered the dooms, after an ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... 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 ...
— Stage Confidences • Clara Morris
... very good elocutionist in Oxford Street. I think I would go and have some lessons, if I were you, Bruce; the summer classes are just beginning. They teach you to speak so clearly, to get your voice over the footlights, as it were. I think all men require to study oratory and elocution. ...
— Tenterhooks • Ada Leverson
... pit, 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; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... her sofa, with her feet towards the green-house; a half-circle of chairs for the audience, with their backs touching the wardrobe—candlestick-footlights, well shaded with square sofa-cushions standing ...
— The Life and Letters of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... the street. It is very stale and weak 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 about schoolboys. Mr. Kipling's "Stalky and Co." is much ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... man called to see me. On a table in my studio lay a "make-up" box—used by actors preparing their faces for the footlights—a bald head with fringe of light hair, large fair moustache, wig paste, a suit of clothes too large for me, and other trifles. My visitor's curiosity was aroused. Taking up my "properties," he ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... Josephine Sabel's father and mother saw her on the stage she was in the chorus of a comic opera company and was wearing tights. Mother ran out of the theater and Father tried to climb up over the footlights to get at Josephine and ...
— Continuous Vaudeville • Will M. Cressy
... salle de musique. The curtain rose on a very pretty garden scene, with trees on either side, green linen on the floor representing grass, a village with a church- steeple in the background, and for stage properties a garden bench and a vase placed just before the footlights, so that it would not interfere with our movements, but would show us where not ...
— In the Courts of Memory 1858-1875. • L. de Hegermann-Lindencrone
... tall, splendidly-made, opulent creature, of my own age, born for the footlights, with an extremely sweet and thrilling voice, and that slight coarseness or exaggeration of gesture and beauty which is the penalty of the stage. She did not in the least resemble a La Valliere as she stood there gazing at me, with her gleaming, pencilled eyes and heavy, scarlet lips. It ...
— Sacred And Profane Love • E. Arnold Bennett
... an undergraduate was singing a song entitled "She Loves Not Me." Such plaints are apt to leave us unharrowed. Across the footlights of an opera-house, the despair of some Italian tenor in red tights and a yellow wig may be convincing enough. Not so, at a concert, the despair of a shy British amateur in evening dress. The undergraduate on the dais, fumbling with his sheet of ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... she thought of lessening her success, of making a sparing use and not giving the full power of her voice and talent; but her resolutions like those of her husband could not withstand the glare of the footlights. Her talent, almost unconsciously, overstepped her will. Then she humbled herself before him, belittled herself. She asked his advice, inquired if he thought her interpretation correct, if he understood the ...
— Artists' Wives • Alphonse Daudet
... 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 feet, and there were clouds of ...
— The Wishing Moon • Louise Elizabeth Dutton
... casual betrayer. He shrugged at the nonsense of a boy's publishing; anybody's publishing he held for a doubtful proof of sanity. His excuse was, that he had not published opinions. Let us observe, and assist in our small sphere; not come mouthing to the footlights! ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... of our wearied ear-drums, fiery snakes sizzled through the air, big wheels spurted brilliant marvels, and along the very edge of the lake, to the great discomfort of the front rows of the stalls, a line of combustibles behaved like gigantic footlights on a spree. ...
— The Making of Mary • Jean Forsyth
... granted me a peep in person had such a thing been possible. Imagine the ordinary costume of an opera-bouffe artist, shorn of all regard for the difference between real indecency and the suggestiveness of indelicacy permissible behind the footlights, and we have the every-day costume of the Persian harem. In the dreamy eventide the lord of the harem usually betakes himself to that characteristic institution of the East and proceeds to drive dull ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... for roof the blue vault of heaven; the sun served for footlights and for the lights above the heads of those who acted. The three Furies—the Eumenides—with their hard and cruel faces and snaky locks, and with blood dripping from their eyes, were represented by actors so great that the hearts of their beholders ...
— A Book of Myths • Jean Lang
... in my chair. The fat star on the stage, with her big mouth and big baby-face, was doing a cake-walk up and down close to the footlights, yelling the chorus ...
— In the Bishop's Carriage • Miriam Michelson
... of course, and no hearth in our lodging, so we betook ourselves to the blacksmith's forge across the platform. If the platform be taken as a stage, and the out-curving margin of the dump to represent the line of the footlights, then our house would be the first wing on the actor's left, and this blacksmith's forge, although no match for it in size, the foremost on the right. It was a low, brown cottage, planted close against the hill, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson |
