On the Bill

The Daily Courant trumpets a typical evening's theatrical entertainment for 1703:

At the Theatre in Dorset Gardens …will be presented a Farce call’d The Cheats of Scapin. And a Comedy of two acts only call’d The Comical Rivals, or the School Boy. With several Italian Sonatas by Signor Gasperini and others. And the Devonshire Girl, being now upon her return from the City of Exeter, will perform … several Dances, … and the Whip of Dunboyne by Mr. Claxton her Master, being the last time of their Performance till Winter. And at the desire of several persons of Quality (hearing that Mr. Pinkethman hath hired the two famous French Girls lately arriv’d from the Emperor’s Court) They will perform several dances upon the Rope upon the Stage being improv’d to that Degree far exceeding all others in that Art. And their Father presents you with the Newest Humours of Harlequin as perform’d by him before the Grand Signor at Constantinople. Also the famous Mr. Evans lately arrived from Vienna will show you wonders of another kind, Vaulting on the Manag’d Horse, being the greatest Master of that Kind in the World.

Dorset Gardens was managed by Christopher Rich and was the Thames-side sister house to Drury Lane. Rich was ever-hungry for spectacle: the 'Devonshire Girl' was put on the bill to try to pull the crowds from the Lincoln's Inn Fields play-house, who were showing the hugely popular 'Mademoiselle Sevigny,' a French dancer.

Rich also seriously considered purchasing an extraordinarily large elephant to use in their productions. According to Colley Cibber, he was only prevented by the jealousy of his dancers at the prospect of being so monstrously upstaged and the fear of his bricklayers that to make an entrance for the beast required moving so much of the wall that the theatre would collapse.