A YOUNG CANADIAN TACKLES LONDON'S WEST END, 1957-58

David Gardner

The following anecdotal article was originally written in 1958, in London, and so, while chronicling a moment of theatrical history, it also serves as a small historical curiositv in itself.

Ce texte anecdotique fut rédigé en 1958, lorsque l'auteur se trouvait toujours à Londres. Tout en recréant un moment précis d'histoire théâtrale, cet article sert en soi-même de modeste curiosité historique.

In 1956 I was honoured to be one of four recipients ¹ of the Stratford Festival's third annual Tyrone Guthrie Awards, a competition commemorating the beloved founder and open to members of the Shakespearean company anxious to carry out a special project or embark on further study. With the $750 award and some additional savings I set out during the summer and autumn of 1957 to hostel my way through 14 countries of Europe ² conducting theatre research. I also earned a little on the side by recording occasional impressions for CBC Radio and mailing back a series of journalistic pieces for The Globe and Mail. A few months before Christmas I ended up in London. I can still remember how giddy I was, being able, after six months, to hear and speak my own language again. Actor friends in London's Canadian colony ³ persuaded me that the time was ripe to stay on and try my luck. 'Hang in till the money runs out, but don't cash in your return ticket' was the universal advice. It was the period in post war England when genteel drawing-room comedies were giving way to the poetic decadence of Tennessee Williams and the North Country resonance of John Osborne's Look Back in Anger. In acting circles the techniques of Joan Littlewood and the American 'Method' were in favour, and front-of-theatre display cases were filled with the stopaction photography of 'Tony' Armstrong Jones. The play I got involved in, Hunter's Moon, was set in contemporary and colonial America, so Canadian and British accents were appropriate. The costs of mounting a West End production were also far less than they would have been in New York. I sent the original of this article to Maclean's Magazine but, understandably, by the time it arrived there, it was considered un-newsworthy.
 

"WHAT IT FELT LIKE TO BE IN A FLOP"

It was mid-January 1958, in London, England. I stood huddled in my overcoat on a cold, damp stage that was bare and unheated and I was thinking that the Winter Garden Theatre had been aptly named.

There were about twenty of us waiting to be interviewed for a new American play called Hunter's Moon. Eventually my turn came and the stage manager pointed to a door. Mr. Banks, one of the English producers, greeted me inside and I was told to take a seat: 'Mr. Connelly will be back in a moment.'

I lit a cigarette and looked around. It was the star dressing room, with a rug on the floor, a divan, and its own fireplace. Mentally I had begun to phrase my answer to the inevitable question 'What have you done?', when a curtain parted and a rotund Upper-New-York-State American with a floppy fedora and a gnome-like appearance came in. It was Marc Connelly, the author-director of the play. I was introduced as a Canadian actor who had come to London recently on a Tyrone Guthrie Award.

'What have you done, Mr. Guthrie?' he asked.

I laughed. 'Gardner' I said, reluctantly declining the honour. I told him about Stratford, the Canadian Players, the Crest, and the C.B.C.

'Anything in New York?'

'Tamburlaine. I played the Prologue and the king who had his tongue torn out.'

He had seen the production, remembered me from it and was interested that I had understudied Anthony Quayle. (Tamburlaine had been at a theatre called the Winter Garden too.)

'You know that part we're in doubt about, Mr. Banks? This boy might be able to do it. I'd like to hear him read. Here's my number. Call me at 10 o'clock tomorrow.'

The next morning we sat opposite each other in his flat near Berkeley Square. We had a cup of instant coffee and he told me about the play.

'I call it a pleasantry; not a fantasy, because that's death at the box office. It's a love story essentially, but I hope it has serious undertones as well.'

Then he started to read the first scene, taking both parts himself, and I sat and listened. It was obvious that he loved his play and knew it literally by heart. I remember him taking off his glasses, looking up and closing his eyes to set the scene. 'The stage opens in darkness with the sound of a disappearing thunderstorm, and the lights come up on the interior of a tiny playhouse . . .'

As he read, I relaxed as I have rarely done at a reading. He was a good actor and made the scene come alive charmingly. It was a scene between a little girl and a history professor, a scene of exposition concerning a family estate located in Upper New York State near the Canadian border and a mysterious village that had existed in the colonial past.

Onstage that afternoon, I read the professor's part with a young dark-haired actress named Lesley Nunnerley. She had played recently in the Winter Garden's production of Mary Juke's Canadian comedy Be My Guest. ⁴

I phoned my agent.'Connelly just likes to hear people read his play,' said the voice from M.C.A.⁵

'But maybe there's something for me in it?'

'They probably want you to understudy the lead and play a small part. It's not worth it. I wouldn't get involved.'

'You're probably right,' I said and hung up.

But Mr. Connelly had asked me to call him again the next morning, so I did.

'Why are you phoning me?' he said.

Startled, I replied, 'Because you asked me to.'

'Have you spoken to your agent this morning?'

'No, not this morning.'

'Well, if I were you I'd give him a call.' Then he asked, 'Are you honest?'

'I try to be, sir.'

'Do you think you could play the lead?'

'The professor?'

'That's right.'

As if from a distance I heard myself say, 'Yes, sir, I think I could.'

'Read again this afternoon. Three o'clock at the theatre. We'll let you know after that.'

Just outside the stage door of the Winter Garden I found a sixpence in the light snow, and put it inside the breast pocket of my suit. The stage manager was on the phone, but signalled me to go onstage quietly.

Mr. Connelly was reading with a girl. He was in his overcoat and had the floppy fedora pulled over this forehead.

'Roger, I had a sign today from God.'

'No, no. Not like that. These people know God. There's nothing sacrosanct and mysterious about Him. "I had a sign today from God." Matter-of-fact.'

The reading continued and I tiptoed over to join Miss Nunnerley, who was pressed against a radiator in the corner.

'Fine, thank you very much,' said Mr. Connelly. The young actress left, and he came over to where we were standing. 'All right now, you two, just read the same scene you did yesterday. I'll go out in the grandstand where I can watch.'

And that was it. We read the scene and Mr. Connelly came up onstage.

'If you're both happy, I am,' he said. 'We begin rehearsals on Wednesday. This is Mr. Denison, our publicity director.'

Mr. Denison looked at me dubiously, a complete unknown in the leading part of a new play. But he managed a smile and asked the inevitable, 'Well now, what have you done?'

I looked at him and said, 'Mr. Denison, if you want an angle, and I'm sure you must, I can only say it's a Cinderella story come true.' And that was the angle he used.

Later I was to learn it was not a new pattern for Marc Connelly. In his plays he has given many actors their first big chance: Henry Fonda in The Farmer Takes a Wife - which Connelly co-wrote with Frank B. Elser; Lynn Fontanne in Dulcy, co-written with George Kaufman; Roland Young in Beggar on Horseback, also a collaboration with Kaufman; and another Canadian, Richard B. Harrison, who played 'De Lawd' in his Pulitzer Prize winning play The Green Pastures, and went on to become America's most famous black actor. Harrison 'walked in out of the street to the audition,' Connelly told an interviewer.⁶

In Hunter's Moon the only player who was 'known' was Sebastian Shaw, matinee idol in a number of Korda films. Still, the name that meant most to theatre audiences was that of the author-director Marc Connelly, the man who had written Green Pastures and such film scenarios as The Good Earth. He was remembered in London, too, for his performance as The Stagemanager in Thornton Wilder's Our Town. Mr. Connelly was also associated with the founding of the New Yorker magazine, and was a university lecturer in theatre history and playwriting at Yale. Marcus Cook Connelly was born in 1890. I remember the day he exploded, 'I'm going to sue the Times. Calling me sixty eight when I'm just a young thing of sixty seven.'

His puckish wit and love of language never failed to amaze and amuse us all.

'Here we go into the hitherto, heretofore. That's the farthest anyone has gone into the hence.'

We would rehearse Hunter's Moon for three and a half weeks. There was a cast of twenty one, mainly English because the bulk of the play took place in 'Serenity,' a Colonial town in the mid-eighteenth century. We rehearsed from 10.00 a.m. till 5.30 p.m. for the first weeks and then in the evenings too, as the opening drew near. Unlike most plays that one sees in the West End, Hunter's Moon was to open 'cold' in London, without the benefit of a preliminary tour on the road. The reason for this was mainly the impossiblity of transporting Timothy O'Brien's spectacular settings, the entire village square of the town of Serenity, a contemporary mansion interior complete with a curving staircase and balcony, as well as two painted backdrops and the children's playhouse of the first scene. We would have two dress rehearsals before an invited audience, and then open on the third night, Wednesday the 26th of February, 1958, twenty-eight years to the day since Green Pastures had opened at the Mansfield Theatre in New York.

Hunter's Moon began in a children's playhouse. Amongst his childhood toys my professor rediscovers the model of a village called 'Serenity,' built by his ancestors two hundred years previously. It is the eve of the professor's wedding, and he must take a quick plane trip to attend to some bothersome details concerning the business empire he has recently inherited. The plane is forced down and the stage transforms into the village of Serenity lit by the November 'hunter's moon'. The play moved from prose into cadence verse and an old-world vocabulary. ('An American verse drama comes to London' wrote the Tatler. ⁷ Unfortunately, throughout the Serenity scenes too great pains were taken to establish the authenticity of the period at the expense of the flow of plot and development of characters. These passages had to be lightened and shaped, but few, if any, were cut. The professor's plane down, he wanders into the village to the mutual amazement of the townsfolk and himself.

'Making a film?' my character asks.

' It's some devilish trick the Iroquois have planned,' whisper the villagers, who, muskets in hand, confront the professor armed only with his knowledge of history and a cigarette lighter. The play takes on the aspect of an anachronistic cartoon.

I can remember Marc exhorting the cast to 'Greet the lighter with all the ohs and ahs and adenoids you can muster.'

Accepted finally, the hero is soon enamoured of a village maiden (Lesley Nunnerley) and resolves to renounce the twentieth century and stay. There are gentle scenes of song and an Indian ballet staged by the villagers. (The theatre bar where the dance was rehearsed was nicknamed 'Liniment Hall.') But the elders of the village, led by Roger (Sebastian Shaw), warn the professor that he is dreaming and must return to his own time and his fiancée (Elizabeth London).

Act Three reverts to the 20th century and the mansion where the play began. The professor confesses to his fiancée (Elizabeth London) that he must return to Serenity and escape this 'kind of death we call today.' But when the scene shifts, the 18th century stockade-gate is barred, and Roger tells him 'You must live in the wonder of your own today.' The hunter's moon darkens to dawn and the professor is discovered lying in the woods by his fiancée and a search party. He awakens to learn that his plane had crashed and it had all been a dream, an allegorical escape from present-day reality into an age of innocence. Even the girl of his dreams can only be found in the flesh-and-blood fiancée who kneels at his side.

But the symbolism and explanation of the evening came too late for the audience, which had been led to believe in a kind of Brigadoon ('From which the composer has . . . withdrawn the score,' moaned Kenneth Tynan) ⁸ that had managed to survive into the Cold War. Neither Serenity nor the last act's return to the 20th century had existed, except in the professor's dream state. Were there clues enough to make this obvious, or should it be made obvious at all? Would the whole question be better left as an intriguing doubt to create a kind of suspense? On this point there were many moments of disagreement and several changes of approach, but in the end no satisfactory solution. Marc had a phrase, 'Wrap it up and nail it!' whenever a scene had gone right, but too often we wrapped up and nailed something that was really not finished.

I remember the rehearsal where Mr. Connelly said, 'There is nothing that says when I write a play I must have a compact with the audience.' Would the critics, however, feel otherwise?

But Marc was concerned with this more than his offhand remark would indicate. He confessed once that it was always the construction of a play that gave him the most trouble. Also Hunter's Moon was not a recent play. It had been written in the 1930s, when dream and time plays enjoyed a popular vogue (Dangerous Corner, Mary Rose, Berkeley Square), and it had been on and off the shelf many times before Marc felt that he had the balance right. The part of the professor was written originally to be played by the late Leslie Howard.

The rehearsal period was the usual combination of hard work, light moments, and some differences of opinion. One day, however, I collapsed onstage in the middle of a scene, and a hastily summoned doctor announced cheerily that I was suffering from mild malnutrition. Marc whisked me off to an over-elaborate supper, after which I was promptly sick. I never told him that. It is one of the idiosyncrasies of British Actors' Equity that an actor receiving a playing salary of more than £20 per week is not paid for rehearsals. I was contracted for £40. So for the month of February, during the rehearsal period, I lived off a CBC cheque from a television show repeated in Canada. I would receive my first (and last), Hunter's Moon cheque on the Friday after we opened. My contract guaranteed me a minimum of two weeks' pay (£80, or $224.00) less 10% agent's commission.

The two dress rehearsals were technical disasters, but the invited nursing staffs of nearby hospitals seemed to enjoy themselves. Canadian theatre friends out front had thought the play a little confusing, but they had found it a charming antidote to the more sordid soul-searching being done in the current season. The young Canadian director, Leon Major, felt it should have a run of at least a month, maybe more.

But as we approached opening night we were, most of us, afraid of how it would be received. To begin with, the Winter Garden Theatre was considered a 'jinx house.' Although situated in the West End, it is slightly off the beaten track of Shaftesbury Avenue and not immediately accessible to the subway lines and buses. Then too we were an unknown cast, and successes in the London theatre inevitably revolve around established and revered leading players. People in the know predicated a flop, and we heard from various sources that the world premiere of Hunter's Moon had been a long time coming. Many actors and actresses over the years had read and refused the play, and typical of the remarks heard was one supposedly attributed to Dorothy Parker that 'Hunter's Moon is about a dull aviator who flies dully back into the dullest part of American history.' And to add to everyone's discomforture, two other shows, Roseland and Keep Your Hair On had opened the previous week and been loudly booed by the gallery on their opening nights. The whole question of audiences booing had been taken up on the front pages of the London papers the week that Hunter's Moon opened, and it was in our minds on the 26th of February.

But nervous as we were, it was a united and happy cast with an abiding affection for the play and for its author Marc Connelly. We desperately wanted Hunter's Moon to succeed.

The day a show opens is a difficult one to fill. There is usually no rehearsal and time hangs heavily. I often go to a movie to take my mind off the ordeal ahead, but on the day of my baptism as a leading player in the West End I was not in the movie mood. I couldn't really afford it either. I had about three pounds ($8.40) left to my name. With it I bought two fairly scraggly bouquets of flowers for my two leading ladies, Lesley Nunnerley and Elizabeth London, a small bottle of champagne plus a theatre poster from my European collection for Marc, and a postcard reproduction from the National Art Gallery for everyone else in the cast and crew. I went to the theatre early and sat in my dressing room and wrote the thirty good luck messages. After a quick supper in the Rendezvous Cafe next door, I had only subway fare in my pocket.

Opening nights are always thrilling. There was a bubble of excitement, and a bustle of unnecessary activity that filled the theatre on both sides of the curtain. Everyone wished everyone well, and there were telegrams from Canada and friends in London, and little gifts. From Kay Swift came an autographed copy of 'Look Skyward,' a song she had composed for the play; from the management a hand-painted ashtray with 'Hunter's Moon' and the date enscribed; from Marc the playscript autographed and a telegram: 'Dear David I hope this gives you a good start in what I know will be a distinguished career. Gratefully, Marc.'

He came and hung his coat and perennial fedora in my dressing room.

'For luck,' he said.

And I put the sixpence I had found the day I got the part into the breast pocket of the corduroy jacket I wore onstage. For luck.

'Beginners, please. Miss Forster and Mr. Gardner.'

Then I almost missed my entrance.

Waiting there in the dressing room where I had first met Marc Connelly, I found myself suddenly thinking about Toronto and, to my surprise, wondering what I would like to do next. The idea of directing came to mind. I realized that there was no need to stay on much longer in England. While I loved living and acting there, part of me had wanted only to prove something - that a lower middle class, colonial Torontonian could make it on the West End.

'Mr. Gardner, please. Stage right.'

Standing in the darkened wings of the stage I heard the audience hush, and felt the lights dim down in the auditorium. The noise of the curtain rising was lost in the rumble of recorded thunder. The lights came up on the little playhouse in the centre of the stage, and the shadowy outlines of the next scene, the village square of Serenity, were gathered around it.

Lesley grabbed my arm and whispered, 'Good show. See you on the village green.'

I played the first scene on edge and very badly, but for the rest of the evening played better, I think, than I had in rehearsal.

The attention of the audience was held until the third act. Then with one ear only I heard the lines onstage, and with the other a growing restlessness out front. Once near the end, when Sebastian Shaw said, 'You'll feel better when you get some sleep,' there was a fairly audible, 'Yes, I think we all will' from someone and a ripple of laughter. The play ended without further incident, and there was no booing. The applause seemed fairly generous and warm. The curtain fell.

Behind it, while 'The Queen' was being played, we embraced each other and no one spoke. Over the loudspeaker system Marc thanked everyone for a wonderful show, and we went back to our dressing rooms.

It was 'Canada Night' in mine with about twenty Canucks, Barb Chilcott, Peter Boretski, Ken Pauli among them. Bea and Silvio Narizzano and Ted Kotcheff took me out for an Italian supper at the Club 50, and let me down gently. I didn't wait up for the reviews.

Early next morning I let the phone ring half a dozen times before I picked it up. It was John Denison, the publicity director.

'Have you seen the papers?'

'No, not yet.'

There was a pause, and then I heard him say, 'It's a flop, Dave, a real flop. They seemed to like you and Lesley but it's terrible for Marc and the play.'

He read me some of the critical coffin nails that sealed the doom of Hunter's Moon: 'Dull, Wordy,' said the Daily Herald; 'An elaborate piece of whimsy' said Harold Hobson; 'Long-winded and heavy-handed' said the Daily Mail; 'A major theatrical disappointment' was the opinion of the Evening News; and in The Times: 'Clearly a great deal of loving labour has gone into this play, but as a work of art no less clearly it is a complete failure.' ⁹

'Have you spoken to Marc?' I asked.

'His line was busy. I'm just going to try again.'

I phoned but there was no answer. I didn't see him until that night at the theatre, and there was no denying that he had been dealt a telling blow. A distinguished playwright can be a very vulnerable human being, and he appeared stunned and a bit older; but his spirit was indomitable. He spoke about getting one's knuckles rapped, and told a string of anecdotes in such close succession that none of us really had a chance to say to him those things that were so difficult to say in any event. Someone called the reviews 'obituary notices' and he retorted, 'Son-of-obituary notices,' and we laughed. On television he was asked how he felt about the critics and blasted off a little steam there.

The reputations which the theatre inflicts are usually more difficult to maintain than to make. For myself there was nothing to be lost, only something to be gained. As George Arliss said, there's a special angel that looks after the actors. But the joy which my own fairly kind reviews might have elicited was tempered by the failure of the whole. It was not enough to be labelled 'courtly,' 'admirable,' 'agreeable hero,' and be compared to 'an earnest Michael Wilding,' and another Canadian, Douglas Montgomery. As actors we had wanted to do more than 'make the best of a difficult evening' (Punch) or be told that we 'made one interested in the characters in spite of their shallowness' (The Stage). ¹⁰ We had wanted a hit, not a flop.

'How long do you think the show will last?' was the quiet question on everyone's lips backstage.

'The Winter Garden has been booked for two weeks. They'll wait until the Sunday papers.'

But there was no need to wait: the critics had been unanimous already. Hunter's Moon closed Saturday after four days and five performances.

Marc threw a closing-night party on the stage, and there was champagne and food, but it was a flat affair. The cast made dates to have lunch next week, and tried to laugh it off, but in the theatre when you succeed it's great, when you fail it hurts. You learn not to attach undue importance to either, but there is a period of hibernation first. Marc made a touching speech from the curving staircase of the mansion set, and I made a fumbling reply. Then the ranks were broken, like an army in defeat, and everyone said good night. Suddenly it was all over and there was only a numb and empty space where for over a month our thoughts and hopes and hearts had been filled with Hunter's Moon.

Marc flew back to New York four days after we closed. I have heard since that he acted The Man Who Came to Dinner in a production in Michigan, and this fall (1958) is returning to London to supervise a television broadcast of Green Pastures. In 1957 it was televised in colour in New York and won the Look Magazine Award as the best television play of the year. He and his friends (The Futurians) had put up most of the money for Hunter's Moon and lost about $25,000. The only consolation was that in New York it would probably have cost three times as much. The elaborate third act living room set was sold and repainted, and used in the mystery hit Speaking of Murder. We were allowed to buy the new clothes provided for us in the show at half price. I bought the corduroy jacket.

I didn't work for six weeks after Hunter's Moon, but then suddenly had a run of luck doing three major television plays as well as a filmed episode for the U.S. television series Navy Log. The fact that I had played a West End lead meant that I played leading roles in them all. Now I return to North America with the Old Vic tour, [1958-59] and I'm sure Hunter's Moon played its part in this as well.

For every play that succeeds on Broadway or in the West End, there are probably twenty that fail. The $25,000 question is, of course, what was wrong with Hunter's Moon, and there is probably little that I can add to what the critics said. In the weeks that followed our closing there were numerous journalistic references to the play and a surprisingly sentimental feeling amongst the commentators that it should and possibly could have been a success. There was also a magazine review a month after the stable door was closed which said 'Here was a fresh spring breeze blowing half the world across ... to stir the cobwebs of the London season,' ¹¹ and deplored its sudden demise; but most had found it wan and boring, the verse and language stilted, and of course lost patience not knowing whether it was really a fantasy or improbable reality. It was on this point particularly that the critics pounced. They felt they had been tricked too many times and not let into the secret convention of the script. Perhaps the lavish settings, which were the one aspect of the production which received unreserved praise, were actually very wrong. If they had been treated simply, and less realistically, the idea of the dream might have been more apparent. Maybe too, if the play had opened in Albany, in its Upper New York environment, or in Boston, some of the encyclopedic historical references would have been relevant and of greater interest.

The Green Pastures had been a fantasy too - strikingly original, controversial and timeless; a conception of Heaven seen through the eyes of a Negro child. The theme of Hunter's Moon was also a large and timeless conception, the tale of an idealist who attempts to retreat into the ivory tower of the past. Unfortunately, as it was worked out, it could only have been provocative to an audience in the 1930s. Today the whole idea needed to be reapproached. The nuclear present and the colonial past were not contrasted with any contemporary validity, both were naive and guileless, and escape was therefore inconsequential. As a result the idea was indeed only a Pleasantry, and subject matter for a musical rather than a symbolic allegory.

But as a pleasantry it was not pleasant enough. It could have been a spoof along the lines of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, or a love story like Berkeley Square, but it was neither. The total effect was a watery combination of allegory, musical comedy and drama, and as a result woolly, diffuse, and lacking in any true shape. The same magic of single purpose that had uplifted the simplicity and sincerity of The Green Pastures to the level of a masterpiece was missing. The fantasy or pleasantry of today needs a harder core.

And the same fault permeated the actual production. It was as rudderless as the writing. Perhaps an outside director could have gleaned the gold from the sludge and either allowed one of the aspects to dominate, or welded the three into an effective theatrical unity. But Marc was too close to his own work to tackle it head on. Where he should have been ruthless he was gentle, where he should have subtracted he added. W.A. Darlington, writing afterwards in the Daily Telegraph, ¹² made the point that playwrights invariably fail when they direct their own plays, and it is perhaps this fact more than any other that was instrumental in the eclipse of Hunter's Moon. I suspect Marc was really too concerned with just having his work performed after so many years.

And by a quirk of fate this verdict was pronounced on the very posters that advertised the play. I didn't notice the typographical error until I sat down to write this. At the bottom of the poster, under the billing for the cast, the designer, and the composer of the incidental music, was this ironic line:

Notes

A YOUNG CANADIAN TACKLES LONDON'S WEST END, 1957-58

David Gardner

1 The four recipients of the 1956 Tyrone Guthrie Awards were: designer MARIE DAY, and actors ROBIN GAMMELL, DAVID GARDNER and WILLIAM SHATNER
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2 The fourteen countries of Europe were seen in the following order: France, Belgium, The Netherlands, Denmark, Germany, Austria, Jugoslavia, Greece, Italy, Britain (England and Scotland), Eire, Norway, Sweden and Finland
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3 Some of the Canadians in London theatres, and on film and television screens during the late 1950s included: Robert Beatty, Peter Boretski, Bernard Braden, Anna Cameron, Barbara Chilcott, Leo Ciceri, John Colicos, Donald and Murray Davis, Richard Easton, Suzanne Finlay, Timothy Findley, William Freedman, Robin Gammell, Elaine Grand, Barbara Hamilton, Frances Hyland, Patricia Joudry, Henry Kaplan, Barbara Kelly, Alexander Knox, Ted Kotcheff, Cec Linder, Leon Major, Stanley Mann, Paul Massie, Irena Mayeska, Neil McCallum, Libby Morris, Bea and Silvio Narizzano, Sidney Newman, Louise Nichol, Ken Pauli, Kate Reid, Toby Robins, Reuben Ship, Milton Shulman, Sean Sullivan, Christopher Taylor, and Frances Tobias, among others
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4 In Toronto, at the Crest Theatre, MARY JUKE's comedy was known as Every Bed Is Narrow. It was retitled Be My Guest for its London run and set in England
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5 M.C.A. (Music Corporation of America), my agency in London
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6 ERIC JOHNS, 'Playwrights Should Be Practical' - Says Marc Connelly,' The Stage 6 Feb 1958. For Harrison's life and career, see WALTER C DANIEL's book, 'De Lawd': Richard B Harrison and 'The Green Pastures' (Greenwood 1986)
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7 The Tatler and Bystander, 26 Feb 1958 p 383
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8 KENNETH TYNAN, 'At the Theatre,' The Observer 2 Mar 1958
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9 The quotations are drawn from the following: HARRY WEAVER, "'Hunter's Moon" Is Clouded,' The Daily Herald 27 Feb 1958; HAROLD HOBSON, 'Theatre,' The Sunday Times 2 Mar 1958; CECIL WILSON, 'Far Too Many People Under the Moon,' The Daily Mail 27 Feb 1958; FELIX BARKER, 'Marc Connelly's Hunter's Moon Is Suffering From Eclipse,' The Evening News 27 Feb 1958; ANON, The Times 27 Feb 1958
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10 The adjectives and phrases are taken from: JOHN BARBER, The Daily Express 27 Feb 1958; RICH., 'Shows Abroad,' Variety 5 Mar 1958; WILSON, The Daily Mail 27 Feb 1958; PHILIP HOPE-WALLACE, "'Hunter's Moon" Fantasy by Marc Connelly,' The Manchester Guardian 28 Feb 1958; The quotations are from: ERIC KEOWN, 'At The Play,' Punch 5 Mar 1958; R.B.M., 'Sentimental Journey,' The Stage 6 Mar 1958
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11 PETER JACKSON, 'Hunter's Moon,' Plays and Players vol 5 no 7 Apr 1958, p 24
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12 W A DARLINGTON, 'Directed by the Author,' The Daily Telegraph 31 Mar 1958: '. . . I find myself asking once again ... whether an author is ever wise to direct his own play.... The more I study this question the more firmly convinced I become that on the stage an artist is unwise to try to go it alone.... [T]wo heads are better than one.'
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