The Theatre: First-Night Fever

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For actors, opening night means excitement and strain under the cold, fishy stare of critics. For the critics, opening night means running, sometimes before the show is over, back to their typewriters. For authors, after squirming in a seat at the rear of the house or wandering backstage with a brandy bottle, it means keeping a death watch until 4 a.m., when the papers come out.

But for audiences, an important first night is a combination of theatrical gamble and social sure thing. Cafe Society, theatre people, Bohemians, middle-class Johnny-on-the-spots—the toughest theatre crowd in the world to please—are the backbone of every Broadway first-night audience. An hour before curtain time, a mob of babbling celebrity-chasers and autograph hounds, aged ten to 70, starts lining up outside the theatre entrance. As. taxis and limousines roll up, the audience's audience gurgles and gasps ("It's Elsa Maxwell!", "It's Freddie March!", "There's Dorothy Parker!"), then surges forward to nail its prey.

Inside the theatre, lobby and aisles are jammed. Chinchilla arrives to snub ermine and mink. Amid the babel of voices can be heard the high British squeak, languid Southern drawl. Continental roll of rs, marcelled New Yorkese. Down in front, as she has been at nearly every Broadway first night for over 20 years, sits elderly, fragile Mrs. Rita Katzenberg.

Last week the season reached its limou-zenith: Cafe Society's favorite performer, Beatrice Lillie, headlined a revue, Set to Music, by Cafe Society's pet playwright, Noel Coward. Autograph fiends were in Heaven, pressed together as close as the cards in a sealed deck. A battery of photographers flashed their bulbs as into the Music Box streamed the John Barrymores, Prince Serge Obolensky, Margo, Tallulah Bankhead, Major Bowes, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Hope Hampton, Lady Castlerosse, Lucius Beebe, many another.

From their pet playwright the glittering audience got only Grade B Coward. One superb, side-splitting burlesque of an English charity pageant is probably the funniest sketch that Coward has ever written. Two of the songs, Mad About the Boy and The Stately Homes of England:*

The baby in the guest wing

Who crouches by the grate

Was walled up in the west wing

In Fourteen Twenty Eight.

are top-notch but are lifted from previous Coward shows in London. For the rest, except for some nimble lyrics, Set to Music is Coward lazily repeating himself, once or twice turning sentimental with his usual bad taste, or trusting to luck and Lillie.

Lillie did not fail him. Whether bursting into a Fragonard boudoir as Brünnhilde on a white horse, or playing a world-weary actress with only energy enough to scoop up gifts of jewelry with both hands, or wandering around a Siberian railway station disguised as a spy, Lillie had only to cock an eyebrow to cause a commotion, drop a muff to start a riot. The world's coolest and most custom-tailored crackpot, she was never, in her satire, more unerring, implacable, uproarious.