John Rich (producer) his work. Garrick even said his pantomime performances were unmatched in his time. 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,
Pierrot helped steer the pantomime away from the old fabulous and knockabout world of fairy-land and into the realm of sentimental—often tearful—realism. In this he was abetted by the novelist and journalist Champfleury, who set himself the task, in the 1840s, of writing "realistic" pantomimes. Among the works he produced were "Marquis Pierrot" (1847), which offers a plausible explanation for Pierrot's powdered face (he begins working-life as a miller's assistant), and the "Pantomime of the Attorney" (1865), which casts Pierrot in the prosaic role of an attorney's clerk. Legrand left the Funambules in 1853 for what was to become his chief