The Boston Stock Company is playing a most excellent piece this week. "Madeline and the Movies" is a melo-farce with dream action,--that is, the person who looks as if he might go to sleep in the first scene really does and imagines all sorts of things about the other characters. Often as this has been done in the movies, we can remember no like plot on the stage. The double drama of the main action; the suspense, the laugh, the further development that brings more suspense, then more laughter, is admirably managed.---Well, George M. Cohan wrote it, so we really don't need to analyze it.

The characterizations are very well done. Walter Gilbert is a handsome movie hero; Mark Kent is his valet, who is responsible for the entire action; Adelyn Bushnell plays a screen struck girl who is madly in love with the hero, Garrison Page (in his latest picture, "Huckleberry Harry, the Heartbreaker"). Miss Bushnell and Jill Middleton have an extremely humorous crying dialogue, Hero, maidens in distress, villyuns, a blackmail plot, suspicion,--it was an elegant evening.

Ralph Morehouse had a trying part as a detective. We suppose it should be blamed on Mr. Cohan; but still, the blurb of the detective which lets the audience, and the actors, know how much he loves humanity seems terribly over-done. It is a trifle sickening for a two-fisted, hardboiled, graft-hunting. Irish detective to fall without warning to the estate of fond "deus ex." Mr. Morehouse would have had it over sooner if he had known his part better. But the prompter's voice can rarely be entirely dispensed with on stock company's first nights.