“Harry-B-Smithing”

Harry B.Smith began the 1918-19 season in the company of old friends. The Soul Kiss was once again touring the country, and a new vehicle for Nora Bayes, commissioned by producer Harry H.Frazee, was scheduled for an October 24 opening at the Broadhurst Theatre. The composer was A.Baldwin Sloane, who had provided songs for The Liberty Belles and A Girl from Dixie, the two shows Harry had a hand in producing. The result was Ladies First, an adaptation of Charles H.Hoyt’s farce A Contented Woman, brought “up to the minute” by Smith’s book and lyrics. The plot traded on the suffragette movement that had won a recent victory when the state legislature of New York adopted a constitutional amendment extending equal voting rights to women in November 1917. While Ladies First was on its pre-Broadway tour, the U.S. Senate was debating a womens suffrage amendment, but by the time the show opened in New York, the bill had been rejected. The political environment surrounding the show would seem to have made the story of Betty Burt (Nora Bayes), who runs against her fiancé, Benton Holmes (Irving Fisher), for Mayor of their village, especially timely. She does not succeed in getting elected, but is satisfied with being the Mayor’s wife. Florence Morrison played the role of Aunt Jim, an aging suffragette who convinces Betty to run for office, and William Kent acted the low comic role of Uncle Tody, her browbeaten husband. The critics complained that Smith’s updating only served to demonstrate more clearly “the corrosion of time and the political tide,” and that the most successful moments were those when Hoyt’s original text managed to shine through the “Harry-B-Smithing.”