CHILDREN'S SONGS AND MUSICAL PLAYS.* Tax writer or compiler of
these three plays for children offers considerable help to the producer or stage-manager by careful instructions as to the production, the clothes, how they should be designed and made for a few shillings each, the stage properties required, and so on. Pictures are also given for guidance. Parts can be found for as many as fifty children in the Pied Piper and Jim Crow, though they might be per- formed by as few as twenty if necessary. The Magic Chest, it is claimed, could be performed adequately by fifteen children. They are written with plenty of vigour and some neatness, though in each case the "Curtain Narrative" or short prologue happens to be unpromising. The Magic Chest, the story of Epimetheus and Pandora, is rather solemn in its theme, and the Pied Piper (with passages interpolated from Browning with a mixture of fidelity and freedom) has, of course, a gloomy ending. On the whole, .Tim Crow, an elaboration of the story of the Jackdaw of Rheims, pro- mises the most cheerful success. Mr. Brumleu supplies incidental music, songs, and dances. The engraving is trying to the eyes of the player, but the music is pleasant to the ear and suitable for children's performance. In the Pied Piper it attains, further, some measure of scholarly treatment, at which less effort seems to be made in the other two.
With these may be mentioned Children's Singing Games. Miss Thomson has written some very pretty, quite simple verses about flowers, familiar animals, and so forth, which, as she explains by various suggestions, can be adapted for sing- ing with action. They may well help the mistress of a class of small children who is endeavouring to find novelty to interest her pupils. Mr. Alban Dobson has set them to music very suitably, with easy airs that should catch a child's ear and cling there. He composes daintily, as befits his father's son, without pretension to more serious musical scholarship than it is fair to demand from an amateur.
• The Pied Piper; Jim Crew; The Magic Chest. By E. Elliot Stock. With incidental music by E. Brumleu. London: Heath, Cranton and Ottheley. [3s. each.]—Children's Singing Games. Words by Lettice Thomson. Music by Alban Dobson. London : Horace Marshall and Son. [is. Od.]
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