Two Nights in Rome is an 1880 American play by Archibald Clavering Gunter.
Directed to and consumed by the popular masses like all of Gunter's output, it has been described by modern critics as a success, and a "crude but powerful drama." [1]
The play opened at Union Square Theatre in New York on August 16, 1880. [2] The New York Times noted that the plot was complicated and could not be easily summarized, and "while the entertainment cannot be said to be up to the standard of the Union-Square performances during the regular season, it furnishes an average Summer evening's amusement." [2] The summer offering closed on Saturday, September 11, 1880. [3] It subsequently toured, and productions can be found being mounted into the 1910s. [4] [5] [6] [7]
Some asserted that the play seemed to borrow from Forget Me Not by Herman Charles Merivale and Florence Crauford Grove, though assertions of plagiarism were not uncommon in that age, The Critic (New York) noting in 1882 that "there is not one scene in 'Forget-me-not' which cannot be found in older writers." [8]
Blanche Roosevelt was an American opera singer, author and journalist. She is best remembered for creating the role of Mabel in The Pirates of Penzance by Gilbert and Sullivan when that opera premiered on Broadway in 1879.
Edmund Law Rogers, also known by the stage name Leslie Edmunds, was an American stage actor. He was also a founding father of the Kappa Sigma fraternity at the University of Virginia.
Benjamin Charles Stephenson or B. C. Stephenson was an English dramatist, lyricist and librettist. After beginning a career in the civil service, he started to write for the theatre, using the pen name "Bolton Rowe". He was author or co-author of several long-running shows of the Victorian theatre. His biggest hit was the comic opera Dorothy, which set records for the length of its original run.
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Alice Julia Burville was an English soprano and actress, best known for her performances in Gilbert and Sullivan operas and other operettas in the 1870s and 1880s.
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Christine Dorothy Brunton, popularly known as Dorothy Brunton, was an Australian singer and actress prominent in musical comedy in Australia and England from the early-1910s to the mid-1930s. She was born into a theatrical family, her mother had been an actress and her father worked as a stage scene designer and painter. Her early roles were in melodramas for the Bland Holt touring company, for which her father worked. From October 1910 Brunton was engaged by J. C. Williamson's New Comic Opera Company, performing in musical comedy roles and acting as understudy to more established actresses.
Sylvia Gerrish was an American musical theatre performer who found success in New York and London in the 1880s and early 1890s. She was known as "The Girl with the Poetical Legs".
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Lenore Alma Stuart Stanley was a British actress and vocalist once popular on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. She was perhaps best remembered as Lady Teazle in Sheridan's The School for Scandal and Aphrodite in George Procter Hawtrey's Atlanta. In a career of more than thirty years she appeared in some sixty plays and made two North American tours. Her later years were spent in reduced circumstances, culminating with her death at a London prison hospital following an arrest for public intoxication.
Laura Joyce Bell was an English-American actress and contralto singer mostly associated with Edwardian musical comedy and light opera.
Marie Jansen was an American musical theatre actress best known for her roles at the end of the 19th century. She starred in a number of successful comic operas, Edwardian musical comedies, and comic plays in New York, Boston, Philadelphia and London during the 1880s and 1890s.
Jennie Lee was a Victorian Era English stage actress, singer and dancer whose career was largely entwined with the title role in Jo, a melodrama her husband, John Pringle Burnett, wove around a relatively minor character from the Charles Dickens novel, Bleak House. She made her stage debut in London at an early age and found success in New York and San Francisco not long afterwards. Lee may have first starred in Jo around 1874 during her tenure at San Francisco's California Theatre, but her real success came with the play's London debut on 22 February 1876 at the Globe Theatre in Newcastle Street. Jo ran for many months at the Globe and other London venues before embarking for several seasons on tours of the British Isles, a return to North America, tours of Australia and New Zealand and later revivals in Britain. Reduced circumstances over her final years forced Lee to seek assistance from an actor's pension fund subsidised in part by proceeds from Royal Command Performances.
Alberta Gallatin was an American stage and film actress active in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. During her near forty-year career she acted in support of the likes of Elizabeth Crocker Bowers, James O’Neil, Edwin Booth, Joseph Jefferson, Thomas W. Keene, Richard Mansfield, Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson, Minnie Maddern Fiske, Otis Skinner, Maurice Barrymore, Joseph Adler, E. H. Sothern and James K. Hackett. Gallatin was perhaps best remembered by theatergoers for her varied classical roles, as Mrs. Alving in Henrik Ibsen's domestic tragedy Ghosts and the central character in the Franz Grillparzer tragedy Sappho. Counted among her few film roles was the part of Mrs. MacCrea in the 1914 silent film The Christian, an early 8-reel production based on the novel by Hall Caine.
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Caroline Madeline Gardner, better known by her stage name Carrie Swain, was an American actress, acrobat, and singer. One of the first female acrobats and belting vocalists to appear in vaudeville, she began her career performing in variety and minstrel shows during the 1870s. She first rose to national prominence in the early 1880s, touring in the musical The Tourists of the Palace Car. In 1882 she created the role of Topsy in composer Caryl Florio and dramatist H. Wayne Ellis's musical adaptation of Uncle Tom's Cabin, and then toured nationally in several plays written for her, among them Leonard Grover's Cad, the Tomboy and Frederick G. Maeder's Mat, the Romp.