The Broadway Anthology | Page 5

into mind,?When all that the first-nighters ask is plain entertainment. How much of the great, wholesome public, hard-working and normal, To whom the final appeal must be made?Frequents our first nights on Broadway??Costumers, friends of the author, and critics,?Scene painters, all of the tradesmen concerned,?Kinsfolk of mummers even to the third generation,?Wine agents, hot-house ladies, unemployed players,?Hearty laughers or ready weepers "planted."?Most of them there prepare for a funeral;?Their diversion is nodding to friends and acquaintances,?And he or she who nods the most times?Is thereby the greatest first-nighter.?Some managers open to hand-picked audiences,?Others strive to escape the regulars;?But the majority seek for the standardized premier faces?That really mean so little in the life of the play.?Listen to the comments during intermission:?"It doesn't get over!" "It's a flop!"?"What atmosphere!" "An absolute steal!"?"Such originality!" "Not a bit life-like!"?"That author has a wonderful memory!"?"He copped that lyric from Irving Berlin!"?"He's as funny as a crutch or a cry for help!"?"They grabbed that number in London!"?"She's one of his tigers!"?"From a Lucile model, my dear, but home-made!"?"I can't hand him anything on this one!"?"Some heavy-sugar papa backed the production!"?"Isn't my boy wonderful!"?"Yes, but my girl is running away with the piece!"?"If you like this, you're not well!"?"What could be sweeter!"?"What large feet she has!" "His Adam's apple annoys me!"?"She must get her clothes on Avenue A!"?"They say she was born there!"?"What an awful sunburn!"?"Best thing in years!" "The storehouse for this one!"?"Did you catch her going up in her lines?"?"Yes, and he's fluffing all over the place!"?"Splendidly produced, don't you think?"?"I think the stage direction is rotten!"?So I suggest the old Roman fashion of presenting,?The artists, like gladiators crying:?"We, who are about to die, salute you!"
THE DRAMATIST
I've put one over at last!?My play with the surprise finish is a bear.?Al Woods wants to read all of my scripts;?Georgie Cohan speaks to me as an equal?And the office boy swings the gate without being asked.?I don't care if the manager's name is as large as the play's Or if the critics are featured all over the ash cans.?I'm going to get mine and I'm going to live.?A Rolls-Royce for me and trips "up the road,"?Long Beach and pretty girls, big eats at the Ritz?And the ice pitcher for the fellows who snubbed me.?How the other reporters laughed?When I showed my first script and started to peddle!?"Stick to the steady job," they advised.?"Play writing is too big a gamble;?It will never keep your nose in the feed bag."?I wrote a trunkful of junk; did a play succeed,?I immediately copied the fashion;?Like a pilfering tailor I stole the new models.?Kind David Belasco, with his face in the gloom,?And mine brightly lighted, said ministerially:?"Rather crude yet, my boy, but the way to write a play?Is to write plays from sunrise to sunset?And rewrite them long after midnight.?Try, try, try, my boy, and God bless you."?Broke and disgusted, I became a play reader?And the "yessir man" to a manager.?I was a play doctor, too.?A few of my patients lived?And I learned about drama from them.?How we gutted the scripts!?Grabbing a wonderful line, a peach of a scene,?A gem of a finish?Out of the rubbish that struggling poor devils?Borrowed money to typewrite and mail to us.?It's like opening oysters looking for pearls,?But pearls are to be found and out of the shell heaps?Come jewels that, polished and set by a clever artificer,?Are a season's theatrical wonder.?Finally came my own big idea.?I wrote and rewrote and cast and recast,?Convinced the manager, got a production.?Here am I young and successful,?And Walter and Thomas and Selwyn have nothing on me.?Press agents are hired to praise me.?Watch for my next big sensation,?But meanwhile I hope that that play-writing plumber,?Who had an idea and nothing else,?Never sees this one.
TYPES
They've got me down for a hick, bo,?Sam Harris says I'm the best boob in the biz,?And that no manager will cast me for anything else.?Curses on my hit in "'Way Down East"?That handcuffs me forever to yokels,?And me a better character actor than Corse Payton!?That's how it is they're stuck on types,?And the wise guy who plays anything?Isn't given a look-in.?Listen to me, young feller, and don't ever?Let 'em tab you for keeps as a type.?It's curtains for a career as sure as you're born.?Why, there's actors sentenced to comedy dog parts,?To Chinks, to Wops, to Frenchmen and fluffs.?There ain't no release for them.?The producers and managers can see only one angle,?And you may be a Mansfield or Sothern.?It's outrageous that's what it is, that make-up?And character acting should be thrown in the discard.?You can sit in an agent's office for months?Before a part comes along that you fit without fixin'.?This natural stuff puts the kibosh on art?And a stock training ain't what it used to be.?Say, if ever I rise to be hind legs of