"Another Opening/Another Show."

In 1932, Robert Benchley wrote, “If you think these are dull days in the theatre, just wait until they appear in somebody’s reminiscences along 1965 and you will realize that we are right at this moment living in the Golden Age . . . In a book probably to be called “Footlight Memories,” you will be able to read of the good old days along Broadway in the early ‘thirties and you will lay the book aside with those old eyes dimmed with tears and crashing one of your grandchildren over the head, will murmur, “Tsk-tsk, those were the times when Titans strode the earth.” He was being sarcastic. Yet, as a playwright somewhat before Benchley’s time wrote, “Much truth is said in jest.”

Robert Benchley was theater critic for Life magazine (1920-30) and then for The New Yorker (1930-1940). In that time, he reviewed premieres (not revivals) of work by the following writers, composers and performers:

DRAMAS

Eugene O’Neill

Lillian Hellman

Thornton Wilder

George Bernard Shaw

Sean O’Casey

Bertolt Brecht

COMEDIES

Noel Coward

James Thurber

Kaufman and Hart

Marx Brothers

MUSICALS

George and Ira Gershwin

Cole Porter

Rodgers and Hart

Jerome Kern & Oscar Hammerstein II

PERFORMANCES

Orson Welles & The Mercury Theater

John Gielgud as Hamlet

Alfred Lunt and Lynne Fontanne

Fred Astaire

Ethel Merman

Bob Hope

It truly was a “Golden Age” and the people involved can justifiably be called, “Titans.” True, a great any more plays were produced in those days than now, so the average quality suffered. We also don’t know how bad the really bad plays were. We know how good Fred Astaire and The Marx Brothers were but only from their movies. Imagine seeing them – and the plays that those movies were based on – in person. The same goes for musicals of the period. The songs of Kern, Gershwin, Porter and Rogers are universally acclaimed, yet imagine hearing the scores of “Showboat,” “Strike Up The Band,” “Kiss Me Kate” or “Babes In Arms” for the first time. You wouldn’t need Robert Benchley to tell you they were great.

I can’t think of another twenty years so rich in - or that so handsomely rewarded – theater talent. Certainly not the last twenty years. Sure, every time has its stars and its hit plays, some more than others (1945-1965 wasn’t too shabby.) I’m not taking away from them. I’m saying that Broadway wasn’t always a fabulous invalid. It was alive and well in the Twenties and Thirties.