The success of Love for Love also demonstrated a number of aspects of the New York theater which are bound to be reflected in the productions of next season. It isn't at all probable that there will be any very comprehensive vogue for Congreve, since this costume foppery is esoteric stuff and not for general consumption, but it is one more weight in the balance for costume plays, revivals, and English importations. A season which found its two outstanding hits in revivals of comedies by Oscar Wilde finds its logical conclusion in Congreve, and when the best foot contemporary American talent can put forward is a dreary farrago of bathos called All My Sons, there is every reason to expect that next year will be even more English and revived.
But, whatever may transpire in the Broadway months to come, the last big first night of the season left a most pleasant taste in the memory of playgoers who had suffered most unreasonably through a season at best dull, pretentious, and essentially meretricious in character.
Shirtcuff Jottings:
- First of the long-distance overland railroad junkets since the wars was promoted jointly by the Seaboard Airline Railroad and the Budd Manufacturing Company which builds those beautiful streamlined, light-weight coaches in competition with Pullman Standard.
- Occasion was the Seaboard's gleaming new Silver Meteor on a twenty-four hour run between New York and Atlanta, and guests at the Birmingham end of the run were received with mayors, governors, bands, photographers, the powerful blessing of a bishop, and powerful hospitality in bottled form.
- Before the wars the golden-spike celebrations of the railroads were among the gaudiest of transcontinental promotion parties, and connoisseurs of such gilt-edge doings are welcoming their reappearance.
- Others that can be anticipated will be the Burlington's inaugural of its Chicago-San Francisco streamliners in conjunction with the Rio Grande and Western Pacific Railroads and the new Southern Railway's trains between New York and New Orleans.
- New Orleans and San Francisco are the two best-equipped cities in the land for municipal barn-raisings, from which aspect the railroads' press agents have a natural….
- Another sort of voiture commanding attention in the vicinage of Fifty-ninth Street is the rolling hot table bearing an enormous side of roast beef which is in use daily at noon in the Plaza Oak Room under the direction of the one and only Jules. The beef is the sole luncheon entree in the men's bar itself and really very wonderful stuff, served white hot, which is hard to achieve with beef, and with a generous side of Yorkshire pudding.
- Jules himself will once more be on duty as maître d'hôtel this summer at the Atlantic Beach Club on Long Island.
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