Winter Garden Theatre emerges as a place where theatrical scale and the realities behind a performance meet. At the opening of 42nd Street, fifty tap dancers, shifting sets, and prolonged applause made the production a spectacle; then, after the curtain calls, the audience learned that director Gower Champion had died. On a later visit, the view from the front row offered a more literal lesson in perspective: the tapping feet disappeared from sight, leaving only the dancers’ knees.

A Theater Built for Spectacle

On August 25, 1980, the diarist went to Winter Garden Theatre for the opening of 42nd Street, arriving by cab amid photographers and crowds who jostled the party. Mary Tyler Moore entered just as the performance was beginning. The production made its scale part of its appeal: its opening number featured fifty tap dancers, and the set changes helped make it, in the diarist’s judgment, an example of what a show should be—big and exciting.

The evening also brought individual performers into focus. Tammy Grimes was funny as an aging star, while Carol Cook, playing the Joan Blondell part, seemed to have arrived at a long-awaited success. The diarist recalled meeting Cook twenty-five years earlier, when she had repeatedly said she had to become a star. At the Winter Garden, that ambition had become visible achievement: Cook was finally a star.

Applause and the News of Champion’s Death

The opening night’s excitement reached its height in the audience’s response. When the show ended, the applause and cheering continued through eighty-five curtain calls. The celebration then stopped abruptly. David Merrick came out, put a hand to his forehead, and announced that Champion, who had been in the hospital, had just died.

The news left the theater unsure how to respond. The lead actress began to cry; the diarist understood her to have recently moved in with Champion. The lead man called for the curtain to come down. The abrupt passage from prolonged applause to grief made the theater itself the setting for a collision between performance and death: the show had continued through its opening, but its ending could not contain what had happened beyond the stage.

A Return from the Front Row

On a later visit, the diarist cabbed to Winter Garden Theatre and watched from the first row. The proximity did not reveal more of the dancing: from that seat, the feet tapping were out of view, and only the dancers’ knees could be seen. The observation reverses the promise of the opening-night spectacle. Being closest to the stage did not provide the fullest picture; the show’s movement was partly concealed by the very angle that brought the performers near.

Afterward, the diarist walked to the Russian Tea Room to meet Chris Makos, who had seen Sphinx and loved it. The theater therefore recurs not only as the site of a singular opening-night shock but also as one stop in a continuing pattern of seeing performances and discussing them with friends.