Charles Frohman, Manager and Man. By Isaac F. Marcosson and
Daniel Frohman. (John Lane. 12s. 6d. net)—However keenly interested we may be in the drama, it is difficult to deny that there is something particularly sordid and distasteful about the details of theatrical business. It is pleasant, therefore, to realize that when handled with some imagination the defects of vulgarity and superficiality which so beset it can be somewhat modified. Charles Frohman, the popular American manager, who lost his life in the Lusitania,' delighted in lavish, not to say ostentatious, productions, not so much from a love of display for its own sake as that he regarded the theatre as a beloved child to whom he could grudge nothing. Sir James Barrie in a charming " Appreciation " of him thus describes his attitude towards the stage : " He loved his schemes. They were a succession of many-coloured romances to him, and were issued to the world not without the accompaniment of the drum, but you would never find him saying anything of himself." Sir James Barrie also pays him the tribute of being a man who never broke his word. As for his services to the drama, the biographers, enthusiastic and eulogistic as they are, cannot convince us that they were of special value. Mr. Frohman had no great love for the " high brow " drama, and had " what was little less than a contempt for the avowedly academic." This being so, we
wish the authors had told ns something more of Mr. Frohman's famous repertory experiment in London in 1910, and the impression it made upon him. People here will be interested to know that in Mr. Frohman's view the English theatre "had a dignity and a distinction far removed from theatrical production in America. There was no sneer of"commercialism ' about it. To be identified with the stage in England was something to be proud oL"
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