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The Sound of Violins. As the drama was resolved in flames, the first-night audience went up in smoke. From her first speech, Julie Harris had held them, as her Joan was held, in the bright wonder of a visitation. In the power of the English (Christopher Plummer) she sat in the cruel dock, a brave but pathetic young girl; yet as she played her life out on the stage, a beauty of holiness unfolded out of her and beat upon the faces of the crowd like great white wings. They followed the gleam of her sincerity as she led them through a thicket of theology, until they came to the existential end: that man cannot be true to God except he be true to himself. When other actors faltered -and every member of the excellent cast, except Boris Karloff as the judge, was jittered off top form on opening night -Julie upbore them. As the final curtain fell on a flaunting pageant of Joan's triumph at the coronation of the Dauphin (Paul Roebling), the first-nighters rose with a roar. They gave the cast eight curtain calls and Julie a standing ovation as she dissolved in tears.
The critics put aside their typewriters and brought out the violins. "For many years I have treasured the word 'great,' " the Daily News's John Chapman wrote. "This morning it belongs to Miss Harris." The Post's Richard Watts declared that he had "never seen a finer portrayal of Joan," and Walter Kerr of the Trib pronounced her "fiercely, wonderfully believable" in her "dazzling honesty." The Times's Brooks Atkinson called her a "fiery particle" and Joan "her finest, most touching performance."
At 1 o'clock the next morning, as the early editions thudded on the sidewalks of Broadway, the status of Julie Harris had changed -from rising star to reigning diva. Yet to the hundreds of well-wishers who tramped through her dressing room it was puzzlingly apparent that this diva was perhaps the most improbable mutation of the type since Charlotte Cushman hauled on tights and ranted Romeo to her sister's Juliet.
Goodbye to All That. The leading lady of the great tradition is expected to resemble the gyascutus. prock, tree squeak and swamp gaboon rolled into one. Bernhardt, it is said, would swirl onstage with "eyes that resembled holes burned into a sheet of paper"; her lines she sang in a melodious but somewhat fruity "voice of gold." Rumor had it that she slumbered in a coffin lined with silk. The majestic Modjeska once held a U.S. audience "clutched in [her] spell" with a heartbreaking recital of what she later admitted was the Polish alphabet, and the mighty Duse would petulantly play her big scenes hidden from the audience.