The plaster can't be three weeks dry, and from the fourth row you'd still smell it. Onstage a man of sixty is saying goodbye in a dark doublet — Forbes-Robertson, farewell tour, Hamlet once more, this was 1913 — and out in the lobby Lee and J. J. are counting the house, 1,502 seats in a building they'd named for their brother Sam. There's a tinted plate of him in profile, sword lowered, chain across the chest.
Longest thing he wrote, too — the full text runs something like four thousand lines, so cutting is the real staging. And the quartos won't agree on the famous bits: one has "solid flesh", another "sallied", which editors have been arguing over since long before 1913. I have two Hamlets behind the counter; one's been loved nearly to pieces.
First night in a new house, the pit's playing blind — nobody knows yet whether the room eats the low strings or hands them back. A bass player told me once you learn a hall in about a week, and after that you play the room, not the part. In 1913 those fellows were the first ever to find out what that one did.