The Road to Yesterday

Road to Yesterday, The (1906), a play by Beulah Marie Dix and E.G. Sutherland. [Herald Square Theatre, 216 perf.] An impressionable American girl, Elspeth Tyrrell (Minnie Dupree), comes to London for a hectic tour. One night she falls asleep and dreams she is living in Elizabethan times and is kidnapped by a handsome ruffian. When she awakes she realizes that the ruffian resembles a friend of a friend. She had never before considered marrying the man, but now she does. The Lee Shubert–produced play, which mixed a satirical look at reincarnation and a swashbuckling tale, was the source of Victor Herbert's last musical, The Dream Girl (1924). Beulah Marie DIX (1876–1970), born in Kingston, Massachusetts, and educated at Radcliffe, wrote numerous plays in the early years of the 20th century. Her other successful work was A Rose o' Plymouth Town (1902), dealing with the early American heroine Priscilla Alden.