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melodies. Thus, a German invented musical comedy in France, and Broadway perfected it, specifically via Jewish, gay, and/or European-emigre composers.
    Q : Is a musical’s title crucial to its success?
    A : Basically, a rose is a rose. A 1925 musical originally titled
My Fair Lady
became
Tell Me More
(who remembers that?), while
Lady Liza
and
The Talk of London
was finally called
My Fair Lady
(1956). Would the originally intended
East Side Story
have been any less successful than
West Side Story
? Or the mega-flop
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
have been any more successful under its first moniker of
Holly Golightly
?
    Q : Who was Broadway’s most prolific and successful librettist?
    A : Harry B. Smith was the most prolific. He had three hundred shows and six thousand songs. But how successful was he? Today his one somewhat-remembered song is “The Sheik of Araby,” typically heard as an instrumental, minus Smith’s lyrics. In most businesses, quantity and quality aren’t synonymous. In his heyday, Smith wasn’t as celebrated as several of his less-prodigious contemporaries.
    Q : What theatrical agent had the longest career?
    A : Nat Day (1886-1982) began his stage career in variety in 1898, then went into the agency business in 1904 and stayed in it for seventy-seven years. Coincidentally, he at one time shared an office floor on London’s Oxford Street with the later-discovered serial killer Dr. Crippen, and actually booked Crippen’s wife for various engagements.
    Q : Why is wearing green in a play considered bad luck?
    A : Before the twentieth century, a green spotlight, or “limelight,” was used topick out the star. If said star wore green, the result was semi-invisibility—the true actor’s nightmare.
    Q : Why do actors consider
Macbeth
such an unlucky play?
    A : Many productions of “the Scottish play,” as it’s referred to by those who won’t say its name, have been plagued by injuries, disasters, even deaths. Sir John Gielgud’s 1942 production saw the deaths of four actors. (Its designer later killed himself.)
Macbeth
is associated with black magic, and to quote from it in an actor’s dressing room is deemed very unlucky. The antidote is to go outside, turn around three times, spit, knock thrice on the door, and beg readmittance. (This is also the antidote, minus spitting, for whistling in a dressing room.)
    Q : Did an actor ever kill a critic?
    A : Probably not. But in 1936 Orson Welles staged
Macbeth
for the Negro Division of the Federal Theatre. The setting was switched to the Caribbean, and the witches’ magic to voodoo. After a scathing review by Percy Hammond of the
New York Herald Tribune
, some of the cast held an all-night voodoo ceremony to get back at Hammond. Three days later he died.
    Q : Was a critic ever actually killed?
    A : Yes, but it was in France in 1945 and Robert Brasillach had collaborated with the Germans. While a critic and editor, he’d called for the executions of Resistance actors and vented his anti-Semitic hatred. He was finally executed at the fort of Montrogue, France, aged 35.
    Q : Who is or was the most mean-spirited Broadway critic?
    A : It’s not John Simon—surprise. By consensus, it seems to have been one William Winter, the
New York Tribune
’s drama critic from 1865 to 1909. One reason for his ongoing grouch may have been his weekly salary of $50, the least of any head of a New York paper’s drama department. Besides his dubious taste, Winter had many hates, including foreigners. Such great European actresses as Duse, Bernhardt, and Réjane he labeled and libeled as “foreign strumpets,” and the pioneering Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen he deemed “a reformer who calls you to crawl with him into a sewer, merely to see and breathe its feculence.”
    Speaking of bigotry, the often-sour Heywood Broun detested
Abie’s Irish Rose
, a comedy about a Jewish-Catholic marriage. In 1922 he wrote that it was “So cheap and offensive that it might serve to