Word: cowardly
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1930-1939
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Whoa, there! Wait a minute! What's this about the Noel Coward doings being the "first smash hit of a middling season" [TIME, Dec. 7]? What about Stage Door! What about Tovarich! I'll grant that the season has been even less than middling and the crop of flops has been a bumper one, but since first they opened both of these plays have been complete sellouts. Stage Door has never fallen below $19,500 a week at the Music Box and if that isn't a smash hit my name is Ivan Ivanovitch...
UnTiMEworthy is the phrase in TIME'S review of Tonight at 8:30 calling Noel Coward's harlequinade the "first smash hit of a middling season." On Oct. 16 (day following opening of Gilbert Miller's Tovarich), owl-eyed Brooks Atkinson of New York Times chuckled, applauded, said: "Tovarich is the season's first hit." On same day, scholarly, professorial looking John Mason Brown of the Post said: "Tovarich is the first smash hit of the season." Richard Watts, Jr., blue-shirted, plumpish pundit of Herald Tribune called Tovarich "the first resounding dramatic smash...
Just then Gertrude Lawrence, who is playing opposite Mr. Coward in "Tonight at 8.30", shouted down, "Oh, Noel, hurry! There's something about the king on the radio...
...Coward hastily donned a dressing-gown and excused himself, and when he returned, it was merely to mention that the king had notified the Herman L. Rogers' at Cannes of Mrs. Simpson's arrival. At that point, the playwright refused to comment further. He was obviously laboring under emotional stress of some kind...
Before bringing the interview to a close, the reporters could not resist the temptation to ask Mr. Coward's opinion of the Two Women parietal rule. In his suave and characteristically witty manner, he replied, "Why, I should think that one woman at a time should be sufficient for any Harvard student...