Rose Briar

The play was produced and staged by Florenz Ziegfeld, with sets by Joseph Urban, incidental music by Victor Herbert, and one song each by Jerome Kern and Donald McGibeny, both with Tarkington lyrics.It had tryouts in Wilmington, Delaware, Atlantic City, Baltimore, Buffalo, and Pittsburgh starting in mid-November 1922, before it premiered on Broadway, Christmas Day 1922.The play was never revived on Broadway, nor adapted for other media, though the original songs Love and the Moon (Kern/Tarkington) and Give Me That Rose (Madame Pompadour) (McGibeny/Tarkington) were released on sheet music and on a phonograph record.Lead Supporting Featured Bit Players The play was never published; this synopsis is compiled from contemporaneous newspaper and magazine reviews.[1] The year previous, she had starred in Tarkington's The Intimate Strangers, originally written for Maude Adams, but reworked for Burke when the former stayed in retirement.They gave a cast list and the settings for each act, and identified the incidental music and that for Florence O'Denishawn's dance as composed by Victor Herbert.The four main actors, Billie Burke, Frank Conroy, Allan Dinehart, and Julia Hoyt were praised for their efforts, and the staging, especially of the first act, was considered very pleasing.Here the local reviewer said Frank Conroy gave "the best work of the entire performance, as the cowed yet adoring speciman of the useless husband of a rich wife.It received a scathing review from a critic at The Evening Sun, who said the theme "is treated in so unreal and preposterous a way (the character delineation is so farcical and so patent a caricature of life) that the piece immediately degenerates into one of those curious exhibitions of bad manners that Mr. Tarkington seems to delight in...".[3] Some of the negative reviews about the production led to Ziegfeld inviting critic Burns Mantle to view a dress rehearsal before the Broadway premiere on December 25, 1922, at the Empire Theatre.Acknowledging Tarkington's accomplishments as novelist, and that no author can expect to master all forms of writing, he confesses the urge to pull his punches when reviewing Rose Briar.