Crowds

I don’t want to brag, but the opening of Hamlet was the most well-attended opening in Broadway history. They actually had to stick three Broadway theaters together to make room for everyone, and even then, the standing room section extended all the way to JFK (where one section of the crowd inadvertently boarded a plane to Russia). And when Hamlet delivered his famous soliloquy? The applause was so thunderous, every eardrum within a ten mile radius exploded en masse. The standing ovation lasted seven and a half weeks, resulting in paralysis from the waste down for a good ninety percent of the audience. Have we played to bigger crowds since then? Of course we have. But there’s nothing more magical than that first time a writer gets to see something they wrote cause so much devastation.