The production of the mongrel play with music, called in our Theatre “Miss Helyett,”—a fabric which commingles comic opera with the farrago known as “farce-comedy,”—was a minor incident in Belasco’s struggle for advancement. Audran’s music, though not in his best vein, is generally tuneful, gay, and spirited. The text was “rewritten from the French of Maxime Boucheron by David Belasco,” and the play was first produced in America, November 3, 1891, at the Star Theatre, New York, Mrs. Carter then making her only appearance in a musical composition, and that being also Belasco’s only association with comic opera, after he left the Theatre of San Francisco. The scene is laid at the Hotel del Norte, in the Spanish Pyrenees Mountains. The story, which is indelicate, relates to a ludicrous accident to a young Quakeress, of demure appearance and frolicsome disposition, whose hypocritical father is conducting her through Europe in search of an advantageous marriage. This female, known as Miss Helyett, falls over a precipice and is caught, buttock-end uppermost, in a convenient tree, from which predicament she is rescued by a strolling painter. She manages to conceal her face from her deliverer, and she parts from him without ascertaining his identity or disclosing her own. Later she determines to discover and to marry the man who is already so familiarly acquainted with her “secret symmetry” (as Byron calls it), and that purpose she ultimately accomplishes. Her search for the unknown and her discovery and conquest of him constitute the substance of this operatic farce.

Mrs. Carter’s personation of Miss Helyett, while not deficient of piquancy, was insignificant. As a singer she was in no way unusual. Belasco relates that, while in Paris with her, to see the French original, he requested Audran to hear Mrs. Carter sing and, if he thought well of her as a singer, to teach her the songs in “Miss Helyett.” “Audran was charmed with her ability,” he says, “and gave her a number of rehearsals. Then he recommended an instructor and even wrote an extra musical number for her,”—which indicates that Audran, as a musician, was easily pleased. His operetta was highly successful in Paris, and hardly less so in London, where Charles Wyndham brought it out, at the Criterion Theatre, under the name of “Miss Decima.” It was generally, and justly, though without rancor, condemned by the press of New York. Nevertheless it had a considerable though not very remunerative career in the metropolis: it was acted at the Star Theatre till January 10, 1892, and on January 11 was transferred to the Standard Theatre, where it maintained itself till February 13,—the 100th performance occurring there on January 29. Belasco seems to have set some store by it at one time, but that was long ago. Wyndham’s London presentation of the composition was made July 23, 1891. This was the original cast of “Miss Helyett” in New York:

After its New York engagement “Miss Helyett” was taken on a tour of principal cities of the country and was performed until the close of the theatrical season of 1891-’92. Notwithstanding its intrinsic paltriness and vulgarity, that play was practically useful to Belasco and Mrs. Carter, providing a temporary source of subsistence for both of them; yielding the actress some useful experience of the stage; permitting the dramatist some leisure for meditation and for rectification of his then immatured Civil War play, and leading, indirectly, to the writing and production of one of the best dramas with which his name is associated.