"
But certainly the main "reason for being" of the Bowery Theatre
those years was to furnish the public with Forrest's and Booth's
performances--the latter having a popularity and circles of
enthusiastic admirers and critics fully equal to the former--though
people were divided as always. For some reason or other, neither
Forrest nor Booth would accept engagements at the more fashionable
theatre, the Park. And it is a curious reminiscence, but a true one,
that both these great actors and their performances were taboo'd by
"polite society" in New York and Boston at the time--probably as being
too robustuous. But no such scruples affected the Bowery.
Recalling from that period the occasion of either Forrest or Booth,
any good night at the old Bowery, pack'd from ceiling to pit with
its audience mainly of alert, well-dress'd, full-blooded young and
middle-aged men, the best average of American-born mechanics--the
emotional nature of the whole mass arous'd by the power and magnetism
of as mighty mimes as ever trod the stage--the whole crowded
auditorium, and what seeth'd in it, and flush'd from its faces and
eyes, to me as much a part of the show as any--bursting forth in
one of those long-kept-up tempests of hand-clapping peculiar to the
Bowery--no dainty kid-glove business, but electric force and muscle
from perhaps 2,000 full-sinew'd men--(the inimitable and chromatic
tempest of one of those ovations to Edwin Forrest, welcoming him back
after an absence, comes up to me this moment)--Such sounds and scenes
as here resumed will surely afford to many old New Yorkers some
fruitful recollections.
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