Front Row/In the Wings/Back Stage

Celebrity Beat — PART 2

“Of all the general assignments which a newspaper artist received, he likes best a theatre assignment. I myself usually have a seat reserved in the first row. Here I get the light from the stage and the musician’s lamp.”

— Lesson 60

Robert Mantell 1928

For Manuel, the “front row” was both a literal seat and a state of access. Sometimes he sat among the audience, sketchpad lit by footlights; other times he slipped into the wings, still close enough to capture the immediacy of performance. From these vantage points, he witnessed moments that overwhelmed even his quick pencil — Caruso lifting an entire hall with his voice, Pavlova floating across the stage as The Swan, Mantell summoning Lear’s fury as if it were meant for him alone. From the front row — or just beyond it — Manuel absorbed the grandeur and awe of the stage, and his drawings caught fleeting fragments of that living theatre.

“I stood in my accustomed place, the wings, and watched their faces, hopeful and idealistic,” Manuel recounted as he slipped from the front row to his better vantage point at the Metropolitan Opera. It was 1919, on the eve of President Woodrow Wilson’s departure for Paris to settle the war question once and for all when another great man, Enrico Caruso, sang the Star Spangled Banner. As Caruso’s thundering voice filled the hall, Manuel watched President Wilson’s face lift with hope, the great men who had guided the nation straightening in their chairs, eyes shining. “Hell, I couldn’t draw them,” he admitted. “The beauty and power of that voice…in triumph shall wave o’er the land of the Free… and the home of the brave. And me — with a pencil for a weapon!”

The theatre was too dark to sketch from his seat in the audience, so Manuel Rosenberg slipped backstage into the wings. That night, Anna Pavlova was performing The Swan in Cincinnati’s Music Hall. As the curtain dropped after her final encore, Manuel watched a graceful figure pass between the wings, her arm locked with her partner’s, both in traditional Russian costume. “She glanced about the stage. Looking up from my sketch pad, I saw her beckoning me,” he wrote. The legendary ballerina looked over his sketch and gently corrected him. “The mouth… the leg… so, they must be,” she said, pointing with her slim finger, her dark eyes sparkling with kindly interest. “Here — it must go so.” He wasn’t sure what she meant then, but he kept the corrected sketch. A year later, he saw her again. “Madame, do you remember making this for me?” he asked. “But yes… a leg… posed for the toe dance… so,” she said, pointing her exquisite toe. “I saw the point at last.”

Clad in the robes of King Lear on his seventy-fourth birthday, the great Shakespearean actor Robert Bruce Mantell turned to Manuel Rosenberg off stage and intoned: “When we are born, we cry that we have come into this vale of fools.” Manuel sketched Mantell many times — in Lear, Macbeth, and Richard III — from the front row, the wings, and the dressing room. Between acts, Mantell puffed on his pipe or dabbed on makeup, and Manuel was always there with his pencil. He liked his drawings so much he tacked them above his hotel writing desk. “Not for vanity,” he told Manuel with a chuckle, “but to keep over-zealous maids from disastrously straightening my paper-laden table.”

The front row was a magical vantage point, where audience and performer became one — and Manuel sketched that fleeting connection for his readers.

The Wings

“In covering a musical comedy or other show from the wings, you will have an audience of stage folk, stage hands, etc., gathered around your shoulders watching you. Usually they are favorable, friendly critics.”

— Lesson 40

Anna Pavlova

The wings were half-backstage, half-limbo — a place where theatre showed its seams. Here Manuel saw not just performance, but the heartbeat of production.

Manuel was in his usual spot — by the side of the stage — sketching legendary Russian basso Feodor Chaliapin when the singer suddenly grabbed his pencil and made a quick sketch of himself. “On the numerous occasions I have sketched the world’s greatest basso,” Manuel wrote, “he has always taken control of my pencil… and made both definite improvements and a number of originals of himself.” Once, in Mephistopheles, Chaliapin actually missed his entrance, tapped his forehead with a grin, and sang his line through the painted drop curtain — never missing the music. Later, still in costume, he stood before the mirror and sketched his own devilish likeness.

Another evening, José Mojica lingered backstage during Resurrection. Manuel handed him a pad, expecting perhaps a note. Instead, Mojica began sketching Mary Garden. Dancers giggled as they peered over his shoulder. When Garden swept in and studied the drawing, she teased, “Do I look like that?” Mojica looked stricken — until she added, “It’s much too pretty.” Manuel, watching his own pencil in someone else’s hand, later confessed, “At that moment I wished for my sketch pad and pencil back.” Mojica himself, Manuel admitted, “was easy to sketch, for he is gifted beyond most singers — for he has, to augment his glorious voice, a handsome face and figure.” That night he counted himself doubly lucky: to have sketched both Mojica and Garden. “I would have been satisfied with either — well, perhaps, Mary would have been slightly preferable. Just slightly!”

Uncle Manuel was once again in his favorite spot — tucked backstage, sketchpad in hand, capturing the magic from the wings. When Howard Thurston rolled into town with his carload of tricks, no place in Cincinnati was busier than the backstage of the Erlanger Grand Theatre. Stagehands darted in and out, curtains billowed, props shifted into place — all in preparation for Thurston’s grand illusions. From his vantage point, Manuel had a bird’s-eye view of the chaos and choreography that the audience never saw. His drawing captures the famous “vanishing lion” act, not from the plush seats of the theatre, but from the thick of it — the secret world just beyond the curtain where illusion was built moment by moment.

Theater Assignments

In covering a musical comedy or other show from the wings, you will have an audience of stage folk, stage hands, etc., gathered around your shoulders watching you. Usually they are favorable, friendly critics. Do not feel disturbed by your audience, however — work ahead, concentrating on your subject. Do not become irritated. You will find that back-stage folk will welcome you, provided you are not temperamental and irritable.

-The Manuel Rosenberg Course in Newspaper Art, 1922

The Dressing Room

“Actor folk are the most congenial of people. You will likely be invited into the star actor’s dressing room to make your sketch while he or she is preparing for the next act.”

— Lesson 82

Francine Larrimore 1925

The dressing room was theatre stripped bare: greasepaint jars, costumes draped on chairs, an actor half-transformed. Here Manuel drew some of his most intimate portraits.

Henry Miller, actor and producer, studied a sketch Manuel made of him in The Famous Mrs. Fair. “A good likeness,” Miller admitted. “But too true to life. Keep that one for your collection… but make a new one. The public wants to look at young stars, not old ones.” He took Manuel’s pencil, erased wrinkles, smoothed the lines of his face, and handed back a portrait of a man half his age. “That’s what they want, a man of twenty-five summers!” Miller said, with equal cheer and resignation.

Manuel found Jeff DeAngelis, the old trouper, in his dressing room in heavy underwear, mid-makeup for Isaac in The School for Scandal. Looking over Manuel’s sketch, he chuckled, “That’s a good impression. But would you mind lending me your pencil? I’ll make one for you of this makeup.” And with surprising skill — for one who had spent years painting portraits only on the surface of his own face — DeAngelis added a sketch of his own to Manuel’s collection.

Manuel Rosenberg found Theodore Roberts exactly where he liked to meet actors best — seated in his makeup chair in the dressing room. Roberts, famous as Moses in Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments, chuckled, and then scrawled his own caption across the sketch: “Roberts making up.”

In the dressing room, Manuel was received as a VIP into the actor’s inner sanctum. His sketches preserved that rare glimpse behind the mask.

Henry Miller

Curtain Call

The front row gave him the show. The wings revealed the craft. The dressing room exposed the soul. For Manuel Rosenberg, the theatre assignment was never just about a likeness — it was about the rare chance to catch a performer between the seen and unseen, onstage and off.

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