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The response of theater parties has been notably nil. Says Ronald Lee, president of Group Sales Box Office: "We listed the show in our Broadway gram, which reaches the leaders of 20,000 theater groups, and didn't get one bite." McCann thinks it's not the price that keeps people away, but the show's length. "They need to be convinced that they can sit for 8% hours and still enjoy themselves." The question should not be whether you can sit still, but whether, as Nickleby unfolds, you will ever want to leave. If the show plays to empty seats, the failure will not belong to the R.S.C. or the importers, but to the Broadway audience.
Once each week, the R.S.C. triumph will be presented on successive nights.
Three times a week, on Wednesdays, Saturdays and Sundays, both parts will run in one day. Bernard Jacobs, president of the Shubert Organization, hopes audiences will try to attend the all-day marathon, "participating with the actors in a survival experience." It might seem like an endurance test to devote an entire day to a single show; but then, this show is all about survival and transcendence. Behind its overt stage action is the unlikely but compelling story of how a struggling theater company found its soul and its success with the same desperate gamble —risking everything on the belief that people could be touched by the melodramatic adventures of a young man on the labyrinthine path to social maturity. The happy ending remains for the millions of eventual TV viewers—and especially for the lucky Broad way playgoers who will get to see, love, live in Nickleby.
Nicholas (reading a newspaper clip): The Crummies troupe is about to cross the Atlantic on a histrionic expedition, and Crummies is quite certain to succeed.
Mr. Crummies: The Americans are much devoted to grand gestures and the melodrama. (Leaning toward Nicholas with a stage whisper) And I have it on the best authority that they will pay ... almost anything!
—By Richard Corliss. Reported by Bonnie Angela/London