They went through
their love scenes without actually scratching and biting.
Even little Anabel Astor, whose good humor for a long time had seemed
invincible, tempestuously left the stage one day in the middle of one of
her scenes with her dancing partner, and could be heard sobbing loudly
in the wings through all that remained of that rehearsal.
Queer things began happening to the plot, resulting sometimes from the
violent transposition of song numbers from one act to another, sometimes
from the interpolation of songs or specialties. Two or three scenes,
which the author regarded with special pride and was prepared to die in
the defense of, were pronounced by Galbraith to be junk. He had made
superhuman efforts, he told Goldsmith and Block, to put a little life
into them, and had demonstrated that this miracle was impossible of
performance. They were dead and they'd got to be buried before they
became, to the olfactory sense, any more unpleasant.
There was an ominous breathlessness in the air after this ultimatum had
been delivered, and at the next rehearsal, when the director announced
the cut of six solid pages of manuscript, the voice of the author was
heard from back of the hall proclaiming in a hollow Euripidean bellow
that it was all over.
Pages:
548
549
550
551
552
553
554
555
556
557
558
559
560
561
562
563
564
565
566
567
568
569
570
571
572