Academy of Music (article 9 november 1900)
This article was published in The Aegis & Intelligencer on 9 november 1900.
About the play Sherlock Holmes at Nixon & Zimmerman's Academy of Music in Baltimore, MD (USA).
Article
Academy of Music.
When William Gillette opens his season in Baltimore in his latest and greatest success, "Sherlock Holmes," at the Academy of Music, Monday, November 12th patrons will be able to see and understand the reason why the celebrated drama enjoyed such a protracted run to capacity audiences at the Garrick Theatre, London. For thirty-six consecutive weeks last season Mr. Gillette appeared in the play to standing room only at each performance and when the theatre was closed on account of hot weather there was no decrease in the attendance. It is conceded that in this, his latest venture, Mr. Gillette has reached the highest point of art both as a dramatist and an actor and the engagement in Baltimore which is for one week with a Saturday matinee only, will beyond a doubt be one of the events of the present season. The story chosen by Mr. Gillette is strongly dramatic and designed to give one a complete idea of Dr. A. Conan Doyle's series in the course of an evening's performance. Dr. Doyle's book will be immediately recognized, but there will be the added delight of enjoying all that is best in the famous detective stories at a glance, as it were, and of becoming acquainted in the flesh and blood with the various characters so familiar to all readers of contemporaneous fiction, while the meeting with Sherlock Holmes in the person of William Gillette will be a surprise in realism for it is admitted that no book hero has ever been so completely and fascinatingly realized as the great detective of fiction in Mr. Gillette's incarnation of him. He is all that the fancy has painted and a little more too. In voice, manner appearance and mental processes, the actor's "Sherlock Holmes" is declared to meet every requirement of the book, and fill the eye with pleasant as well as poetic satisfaction. The canvas like clearness of the whole thing, its dramatic intensity and romantic charm, makes it intensely satisfactory to the audience and has made it one of the most popular plays of recent times.
