The piece that re-established her in public favor, however, was "Excelsior, Jr.;" New York, in particular, finding her impersonation of the up-to-date young man about town very much to its liking. After she joined the Weber and Fields organization in New York and unexpectedly shone forth as a marvellously entrancing interpreter of "coon" songs, she clinched her hold on the public with which she is now an established favorite.
During the season of 1899-1900 Fay Templeton was identified with those two gorgeous productions, "The Man in the Moon" and "Broadway to Tokio," besides taking a flyer into vaudeville, where she first brought out her wonderful imitation of Fougère, the French chanteuse. In shows like "The Man in the Moon" and "Broadway to Tokio" one is expected to have nothing with him except the two senses of sight and hearing. It is the spectator's part to take what comes--and it is supposed to come constantly and rapidly--simply for the sake of the moment's fun that there may be in it. His cue is to laugh at the stage jokes of the hard-worked comedians, and to be dazzled into a semi-hypnotic state by the dancing women posturing amid marvellous effects of light and color. They are eminently entertainments to be felt and not thought about. One is constantly receiving new impressions, and just as constantly forgetting all about them. The result is that after the shows are all over, one is surprised to find that from the mass of material he has retained no one impression distinctly. He remembers only flashes here and there.
One figure, however, was revealed by each and every one of these memory flashes,--that of Fay Templeton, whose wonderful versatility as an entertainer, and whose pure virtuosity as an artist, both of them given free rein in these spectacles, raised her head and shoulders above her associates in the two casts.
In "The Man in the Moon" there was nothing else that evidenced half the art shown in her singing of the ditty "I Want a Filipino Man." It was, it is true, a fearfully suggestive study of elemental human passion, a song of hot blood and crude, unblushing animalism. But it was wonderfully well done, and the swing of its rhythmic sensuality was not to be resisted.