ABSTRACT
After the armistice in 1918, the pleasure-seeking, prohibition-despising, boom-rich American public enabled the musical theatre to revel in a decade of luxury and wastefulness and irresponsibility such as it had never known before, and will probably never know again in our time. Money was available to produce anything with the slightest prospect of success, and audiences were lenient, easily amused, and generous with their patronage. Despite the H. C. L., as the high cost of living was affectionately called, people were making money faster than they could spend it. In the theatre, production costs had not yet risen in ratio to the increased national income. For one mad, magical decade, the Broadway theatre could afford to produce as many musical shows as it wanted to, and to market them at box-office prices that the audience could pay without feeling any pinch.
