By Tom Collins

Henry (a.k.a. Harry) Du Souchet, Prescott's territorial telegrapher, justice of the peace, notary public and beloved comedian, played a key role in the popularity of the Prescott Theatre on Alarcon Street in 1878 and 1879. As a tribute to Harry's skill and popularity, the Prescott Dramatic Club offered him a benefit show in 1879, allowing him to choose two plays in which he would star. He chose two short comedies: "Doing for the Best" and "Nan, the Good-for-Nothing." Unfortunately, Harry failed to learn his lines and made an embarrassing hash of the performance on Sept. 30. Frank Frémont, son of the Territorial Governor, John Frémont, reported that the plays were so badly acted they were amusing. One anonymous playgoer complained that the prompter was heard as often as the player! The newspapers criticized the club for its decline in quality.

By December, Harry left Prescott in disgrace and, in the wake of his departure, one anonymous gentleman reported to the Prescott Journal Miner that he had recently seen "the pill in his seedy apparel" in San Francisco and that this "loafer and companion" was now an "object of pity." Although Harry lived in poverty for a time, he found his way into the professional theatrical scene. He made his debut, using the name of Harry A. Prescott, in a production of "The Toodles" at the Standard Theatre with the renowned actor John E. Owens. He then toured the Pacific Coast in numerous melodramas.

By 1884, Harry was living in New York City and managed to get his own comedy, "Dollars and Hearts," produced at the Windsor Theatre in June of 1888. Its run was brief, but Harry survived by taking a job as a telegrapher on the staff of the New York Tribune. He wrote what was to be his first great breakthrough, "My Friend from India," in 1891, but failed to snag a producer for it until August 1896. The Smyth & Rice Comedy Co. made the show a huge hit and it launched his playwriting career. He followed with a rollicking farce entitled "The Man from Mexico" in April 1897. This comedy played all over the English-speaking world for 14 years and, in its 1912 musical version "Over the River" starring Eddie Foy, ran for 120 consecutive performances at the Globe Theatre in New York City.

Shortly after the original play's premiere, Leslie's Weekly described Harry as "dark, distinguished, and foreign-looking, amiably vivacious in manner, and neither embittered by adversity nor flustered by success" (May 1897). Harry went on to produce four more dramatic works and lived long enough to see two of his plays produced for the silent screen in Hollywood: "The Man from Mexico," starring John Barrymore in 1914, and "Betsy Ross," with Alice Brady in 1917. He died at a New York sanitarium in 1922. Five years later, Cecil B. DeMille produced "My Friend from India" as a silent film.

Of all the stage-struck amateur actors in Territorial Prescott, it was Harry alone who managed to achieve the dream of making it on the professional stage.

It was indeed ironic that when "The Man from Mexico" reached the Elks Opera House on Oct. 19, 1905, with a respectable professional cast, no mention was made in the review in the Prescott Journal Miner as to the author or his role in 1870s Prescott amateur theater. Henry A. Du Souchet's contribution to the culture of Prescott warrants permanent recognition in the history of the Arizona Territory.

Tom Collins is the author of "Stage-Struck Settlers in the Sun-Kissed Land: The Amateur Theatre in Territorial Prescott, 1868-1903." He is a retired college professor of theater history and volunteers at the Sharlot Hall Museum Archives.

This article, in an expanded version, and other Days Past articles are available at sharlothallmuseum.org/archives and via RSS e-mail subscription. Collins has several other Days Past articles posted on the SHM website about theater in old Prescott.

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