The Famous Actress Who Loved Playing a Rooster - Atlas Obscura 🔗 🎭 🇫🇷 🐓 🗽

Maude Adams was known for being Peter Pan, but her favorite role was that of a preening French rooster.

When CHANTECLER finally opened in New York, after months of rehearsals, including special instruction for the actors on making proper fowl-like noises, Adams first appeared on stage in evening dress, to deliver the prologue. After she disappeared backstage, the curtain rose on an oversized barnyard, with a haystack towering over the stage. The sets had been created by a star-studded team of designers, who’d worked on some of the city’s great monuments—the Brooklyn Masonic Temple, the vaulted ceiling at Grand Central Station. When Adams reappeared, fully feathered, as the Rooster, she would have been dwarfed by the sets, made to seem smaller than human, akin to actual barnyard creatures.

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