What a thing his love would be, when it should come, free of its tasks
and obligations; no longer in the treadmill making her world go round,
but given its wings again!
CHAPTER VIII
SUCCESS--AND A RECOGNITION
There is a kaleidoscopic character about the events of the ten days or
so preceding the opening performance of most musical comedies which
would make a sober chronicle of them seem fantastically incredible; and
this law of Nature made no exception in the case of _The Girl
Up-stairs_. There were rehearsals which ran so smoothly and swiftly that
they'd have done for performances; there were others so abominably bad
that the bare idea of presenting the mess resulting from six weeks'
toil, before people who had paid money to see it, was a nightmare.
As the nervous pressure mounted, people took to exploding all over the
place in the most grotesquely inconceivable ways and from totally
unpredictable causes. Freddy France, who played the comic detective
(like most comedians he had no sense of humor whatever and treated his
"art" with a sort of sacrificial solemnity), developed delusions of
persecution, proclaimed himself the victim of a conspiracy to which the
owners, the author, Galbraith and most of the principals were parties,
and finally, when the director cut out a little scene that he had two
feeble jokes in, reached up unexpectedly and hit McGill on the nose,
flung his part on the stage, stamped on it and left the theater.
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