over. A scream from start to finish."--Wodehouse, in _The Weekly
Bear-Baiter_ (with which is incorporated _The Scurvy Knaves'
Gazette_).

The lot of a dramatic critic is, in many respects, an enviable one.
Lately, there has been the growing practice among critics of roasting
a play on the morning after production, and then having another go at
it in the Sunday edition under the title of "Second Swats" or "The
Past Week in the Theatre," which has made it pretty rocky going for
dramatists who thus get it twice in the same place, and experience the
complex emotions of the commuter who, coming home in the dark, trips
over the baby's cart and bumps his head against the hat stand.

There is also no purer pleasure than that of getting into a theatre on
what the poet Milton used to call "the nod." I remember Brigham Young
saying to me once with not unnatural chagrin, "You're a lucky man,
Wodehouse. It doesn't cost you a nickel to go to a theatre. When I
want to take in a show with the wife, I have to buy up the whole of
the orchestra floor. And even then it's a tight fit."

My fellow critics and I escape this financial trouble, and it gives us
a good deal of pleasure, when the male star is counting the house over
the heroine's head (during their big love scene) to see him frown as
he catches sight of us and hastily revise his original estimate.




THE AGONIES OF WRITING A MUSICAL COMEDY