1882 | Theater, Film
Theater, Film
Theater: La Belle Russe by David Belasco 5/8 at Wallack's Theater, New York; Ghosts (Gengangere) by Henrik Ibsen 5/20 at Chicago's Arrone Turner Hall (in Norwegian); An Unequal Match by the late English playwright Tom Taylor 11/6 at Wallack's Theater, New York, introduces U.S. audiences to the "Jersey Lilly" Lillie Langtry (Emily Charlotte Le Breton Langtry), 30, who made her London stage debut last year. Mrs. Langtry gained her soubriquet from the painting "The Jersey Lilly" by Sir John Everett Millais, for whom she posed; The Silver King by English playwright Henry Arthur Jones, 31, 11/16 at the Princess's Theatre, London; Fedora by French playwright Victorien Sardou, 51, 12/11 at the Théâtre du Vaudeville, Paris, with Sarah Bernhardt. Written especially for Bernhardt, the melodrama provides the name for a fashionable new soft felt hat with a high roll on its side brim and a lengthwise crease in its low crown.
Jumbo the elephant appears at New York's Madison Square Garden beginning April 10 in performances of Barnum & Bailey's Circus, which expands from two rings to three. P. T. Barnum has imported the "largest elephant in or out of captivity" (its name has introduced the word jumbo to the English language), the animal stands 11 feet tall at the shoulders and weighs 6½ tons. Barnum claims it stands 12 feet tall at the shoulders, measures 26 feet in length if the trunk is included, and weighs 10½ tons. Captured 20 years ago as a baby, Jumbo has been a prime attraction at London's 56-year-old Royal Zoological Gardens since 1865 when he was acquired from the Jardin des Plantes at Paris in exchange for a rhinoceros. The London zoo has sold him to Barnum for $10,000 because he has become difficult, his sale has raised a storm of protest in England, and there will be general mourning when Jumbo is killed by a freight train on the Grand Trunk Railway at St. Thomas, Ontario, in mid-September 1885.