John Rich (producer) John Rich (producer) John Rich (1692–1761) was an important director and theatre manager in 18th-century London. He opened the New Theatre at Lincoln's Inn Fields (1714), which he managed until he opened the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden (1732). He managed Covent Garden until 1761, putting on ever more lavish productions. He introduced pantomime to the English stage and played a dancing and mute Harlequin himself from 1717 to 1760 under the stage name of "Lun." Rich's version of the servant character, Arlecchino, moved away from the poor, disheveled, loud, and crude character, to a colorfully-dressed, silent Harlequin, performing fanciful tricks,
Pierrot important factor that probably hastened his degeneration was the multiplicity of his fairground interpreters. Not only actors but also acrobats and dancers were quick to seize on his role, inadvertently reducing Pierrot to a generic type. The extent of that degeneration may be gauged by the fact that Pierrot came to be confused, apparently because of his manner and costume, with that much coarser character Gilles, as a famous portrait by Antoine Watteau attests (note title of image at right). But in the 1720s, Pierrot at last came into his own. Antoine Galland's final volume of The "Thousand and One