Reception
The New York Times reported on the musical's Boston opening (in September 1935), writing about Hart's book that it combines "satire, sentiment and humor in good proportion." Porter's score and lyrics were said to be "original and tuneful." Special mention was made of Mary Boland: "Miss Boland played the ingeniously sentimental matron with gusto and enthusiasm, wore royal robes or a one-piece bathing suit with equal aplomb, sang a bit, and danced with every sign of enjoyment."
It was considered "one of the great theatrical events of the 1930s." Of the Broadway opening (on October 12, 1935), Brooks Atkinson (The New York Times) wrote that the show
"is a rapturous masquerade...Each of the guilds that produce our luxurious musical shows has shared equally in the general excellence of an upper-class song-and-dance arcade...It is an excellent fable-good humored, slightly romantic and eminently pragmatic...The music is jaunty, versatile and imaginative...Mary Boland is the queen of the book and the performance and a carnival of comic delights."
Burns Mantle of the NY Daily News declared Jubilee, "the most satisfying musical comedy produced in an American theatre within the length of trustworthy memories." Reviewers admired the "book", giving the show a strong plot and solid writing integrated with the music. They quickly picked "Begin the Beguine" and "Just One of Those Things" as favorite songs.
Read more about this topic: Jubilee (musical)
Famous quotes containing the word reception:
“He’s leaving Germany by special request of the Nazi government. First he sends a dispatch about Danzig and how 10,000 German tourists are pouring into the city every day with butterfly nets in their hands and submachine guns in their knapsacks. They warn him right then. What does he do next? Goes to a reception at von Ribbentropf’s and keeps yelling for gefilte fish!”
—Billy Wilder (b. 1906)
“To the United States the Third World often takes the form of a black woman who has been made pregnant in a moment of passion and who shows up one day in the reception room on the forty-ninth floor threatening to make a scene. The lawyers pay the woman off; sometimes uniformed guards accompany her to the elevators.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)
“But in the reception of metaphysical formula, all depends, as regards their actual and ulterior result, on the pre-existent qualities of that soil of human nature into which they fall—the company they find already present there, on their admission into the house of thought.”
—Walter Pater (1839–1894)