Great Day in the Morning

"Thorstein Veblen's theory of conspicuous consumption would find itself cozily vindicated in Thomas Babe's GREAT DAY IN THE MORNING, a new play set in the fin de siecle that also manages to pull the chain of the Charles Keatings, Michael Milkens and other bandits of more recent times. Not that the elusive DAY...is that blunt about it or easy to peg.

The author himself has called this sprawling opus `a little of this, a little of that, part musical, part tragedy, part melodrama' and he should know. GREAT DAY is all of the above and more, drawing heavily for its inspiration from Elizabeth Wharton Drexel's book `King Lehr and the Gilded Age', but laced also with inventive helpings of Babe's own brand of vitiating humor and sobering seriousness. The seriousness is personified in the fictionalized Wharton Drexel character, here called Bessie, the young, wealthy, recently widowed Philadelphian who moved to New York in the late 1800s in search of adventure. She found more of it than she bargained for in the shape of a curious new husband: glittery Harry Lehr who sang for his supper at all the `A' parties of New York's upper crust. To assess that tainted, extravagant whirl, Babe juxtaposes Elizabeth's innocence with Harry's decadence, tossing in various examples of the Rich (arrogant Caroline Astor, outree Mrs Stuyvesant Fish) and Famous (a gently wise-cracking Ulysses S Grant)" Sylvie Drake, Los Angeles Times

"Only Thomas Babe could have written this play, imbued as it is with his special blend of magical realism, energized with his bold theatricality, empowered by his fluid, often poetic language, unabashed in its forays into romanticism and melodrama. It bears the Babe cachet. The playwright gives his imagination free rein, mixing fact, fiction and fantasy.... It all works so well.... GREAT DAY IN THE MORNING is playwright Babe in sure command of his powers. It glints with shards of coldly glittering brilliance, heartens with pockets of warmth and it always delights the senses...." Polly Warfield, Drama-Logue