Girl of the Golden West, The
The Oxford Companion to American Theatre
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2004
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© The Oxford Companion to American Theatre 2004, originally published by Oxford University Press 2004. (Hide copyright information)
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Girl of the Golden West, The (1905), a play by David
Belasco. [
Belasco Theatre, 224 perf.] Minnie Falconer ( Blanche
Bates) may be the owner of the Polka Saloon in a California mining camp called Cloudy Mountain, but she is also the town's respected schoolmarm, and she is courted by the gentlemanly but dangerous sheriff Jack Rance ( Frank Keenan). While the town seeks a bandit named Ramerrez, she falls in love with a handsome young man named Dick Johnson ( Robert
Hilliard), who she soon discovers is none other than the hunted bandit. When Johnson is shot by Rance, Minnie hides Johnson in her loft, but his whereabouts are revealed to Rance by blood dripping from the ceiling. She agrees to play a game of poker with Rance, Johnson's fate to be determined by the winner. She cheats to win, pulling a pair of aces from her petticoat after distracting the sheriff. However, the miners would still hang Johnson, and only Minnie's pleas spare him. Reluctantly she agrees to leave her beloved golden hills, and she and Johnson ride off to find a new life. Responding to criticism about the mechanics of his plot, especially the dripping blood, Belasco wrote, “I know the period of Forty‐nine as I know my alphabet, and there are things in my
The Girl of the Golden West truer than many of the incidents [in the stories by] Bret Harte.” However, Belasco's biographer, Craig Timberlake, has suggested the many debts the dramatist owed Harte, among them a heroine who ran a Polka Saloon. Typical of producer‐director's Belasco's striking theatrical effects was his opening, in which a vertically moving panorama took audiences from Minnie's cabin high in the hills down a path to the front of the saloon. The rest of the stage was then lit to reveal the first act set. The play was made into a popular opera by Puccini in 1910.
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