The Drury Lane Joan of Arc was brought out on
Thursday. Mr. Buss's playwright seems to have been of the opinion we have just expressed, that the drama is a workof supererogation in such cases, for be has not encumbered his spectacle with either plot, incident, or dialogue. He has constructed a sort of phantasmagoria, in which :Miss ROMER is the principal figure, glittering in silver tissue, with lamed brow and glaived hand, but no more like Joan of Arc than Hercules. The personages do not trouble the audience with much talking, but en revenche they sing an enormous quantity of doggrel rhymes set to music by Mr. BALFE. Now Mr. BALFE, who is a clever man, and evidently ambitious to achieve a name among the com- posers of England, ought to have had nothing to do with a thing of this kind. It is a show-piece, and nothing store; 'and good music, in such a piece, is just as supeitluous as a carefully-constructed plot or laboured dramatic writing. Any other noise equally loud, provided it were a compound of dunes and trumpets in the orchestra, and shouts and screams on the stage, would have answered the purpose just as well as the combinations in Mr. BALFE'S score. He must have felt that he was merely doin.; a manager's job, and a very ungrateful one ; for his music has not a vestige of the animal spirits, the showy viva- city, witich, amid a thousand faults, have made his former productions agreeable to the popular ear. We shall enter into no further criticism on music composed under such circumstances; merely counselling Mr. BaLee., as he values his musical character, not to lower his dignity as an artist by becoming noise-manufacturer to Mr. spectacles, because that gentleman finds it conveoient to print the name of a pi,- pula- composer in his bills. As to the singing, we can only say that all the singers were as loud as their lungs would admit of ; but the band were louder still ; and a famous huriy-burly they made among them. As to the acting, there neither was nor could be any. The spectacle is not comparable in point of effectiveness with the Covent Garden show ; though the scenery, by the GRIEVES, is beauti- ful, and the costumes are sufficiently splendid and characteristic. The ambuscade is similarly managed, but in a way inferior to that at the other house ; and the burning in the market-place at Rouen, though more crowded with people, is not so strikingly real, nor by any means so lavish of flame. As fur the new light, with the nonsensical and un- readable name, we saw nothing but the red glare in constant use at Astley's and elsewhere : indeed it looks like sheer wantonness of hum- bug; as if the manager were grinning at his gulls the public—not through a horse-collar, but through the medium of the playbills.
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