The Opening Number
Anatomy of a Revue, Part 7: Teaching the Audience What Kind of Evening They're In For
The house lights dim. Two thousand people stop talking — not all at once, but in a wave, a ripple of silence that moves from the orchestra to the balcony. The last program rustles shut. The last cough. Then the dark.
You have their attention. All of it. For exactly this moment. And what you do with it — the first thing they see, the first thing they hear, the first breath the stage takes — will determine everything that follows.
The opening number of a revue is not the first number. It is the promise. It is the handshake between the stage and the audience. It says: This is who we are. This is what kind of evening you're in for. You are in good hands.
Get it right and the audience will follow you anywhere for two hours. Get it wrong and you spend the rest of the evening trying to recover trust you never earned.
What the Opening Number Must Do
Every opening number in every revue I ever directed had to accomplish four things simultaneously. Not one. Not two. All four, at the same time, in three to five minutes.
1. Establish the company.
The audience needs to see who they're spending the evening with. Not every performer — you hold some back, you protect your surprises — but enough to give the audience a sense of the ensemble. The opening number is usually a company number for this reason. It says: look at all these people. Look at the variety, the energy, the talent assembled on this stage tonight. This is your company.
The temptation is to open with your star. The solo spot, the big entrance, the name on the marquee taking the stage. Resist this temptation. A star entrance is a promise of a different kind — it says this evening is about one person. In a revue, the evening is about variety. The company number says: this evening is about US. All of us. And you haven't seen anything yet.
2. Set the tone.
Is this a sophisticated revue or a raucous one? Intimate or spectacular? Satirical or sentimental? The opening number answers these questions before the audience has consciously asked them. The tempo of the music, the style of the choreography, the design of the costumes, the quality of the light — all of it telegraphs what kind of evening this is.
At the Greenwich Village Follies, I opened with elegance. Slow curtain, a beautiful stage picture, sophisticated music, the company arranged like a painting that came to life. The audience knew immediately: this is not a burlesque. This is not a vaudeville. This is something refined. That set the bar for every number that followed.
At Ringling Brothers, I opened with chaos. The full company, all three rings, everything at once — acrobats, clowns, animals, music, light, spectacle exploding in every direction. The audience knew: this is not refined. This is ALIVE. Hold on to your seat. Both openings were right, because both were honest about what followed.
The worst thing an opening number can do is lie. If the opening promises sophistication and the second number is a slapstick sketch, the audience feels betrayed. Not consciously — they won't say "the tone shifted." They'll say "something felt off." That feeling of wrongness, once established, is nearly impossible to repair. The opening must be an honest advertisement for the evening.
3. Survive inattention.
This is the practical truth nobody wants to admit: the audience is not fully present for the opening number. They're settling. Adjusting coats. Finding their glasses. Whispering to their companion about the program or the set or the woman in the third row wearing the hat. The opening number plays to an audience that is — for the first ninety seconds, at least — only half there.
This means the opening must be strong enough to command attention AND resilient enough to survive the lack of it. It cannot depend on a single joke that lands only if you hear the setup. It cannot depend on a subtle visual that requires focused eyes. It must work on the audience that's watching AND the audience that's still arriving.
Big. Bright. Musical. Moving. Give them something to look at. Give them something to hear. Give them something that pulls them into the evening whether they're ready or not. By the time the opening number ends, the last whisperer should be silent, the last program should be closed, and every eye should be on the stage. That is the opening number's job: to gather the audience into one body, one attention, one shared breath.
4. Create the appetite.
The most important function and the least obvious. The opening number must make the audience hungry for what comes next.
Not satisfied. HUNGRY.
If the opening is too good — if it's the best thing in the show — the evening has nowhere to go. The audience peaked in the first five minutes and everything after is a decline. This is the director's paradox: the opening must be excellent, but it must not be the best. It must be a promise, not a fulfillment. The audience should leave the opening thinking: if that's how they open, what's coming next?
This is why I never put my best number first. I never opened with my biggest star. I never opened with the most spectacular visual moment of the evening. The opening was the appetizer — beautifully prepared, perfectly seasoned, generous enough to whet the appetite without dulling it. The main course came later. The audience had to earn it.
The Anatomy of an Opening
Here is the structure I used, with variations, across thirty-five years:
The image. Before anyone moves, before anyone sings, there is a stage picture. The curtain rises — or the lights come up — and the audience sees something. This is the first impression, and it must be composed with the same care as the opening shot of a film. What does the audience see? A full stage or an empty one? Color or darkness? Stillness or motion? This image is the first word of the evening's visual sentence. Make it count.
At the Almanac, I opened on a bare stage with a single follow spot picking up a performer who walked on from the wings carrying a sign: "JOHN MURRAY ANDERSON'S ALMANAC." Simple. Direct. A little self-aware. The audience laughed — they were being welcomed, personally, by name. Then the music started and the company flooded in and the evening began. But that first image — one person, one sign, one spot — was the handshake. Hello. This is ours. Welcome.
The music. The opening number needs music that moves — not necessarily fast, but alive. Music that has energy, that has rhythm, that tells the body to pay attention. An opening ballad is death. The audience is not ready for stillness. They need to be activated, their blood moved, their attention sharpened. You can slow down later. You can devastate them with a torch song in the second slot. But the opening must MOVE.
The build. The opening starts at one level of energy and ends at a higher one. Not a scream — a build. More performers, more light, more sound, more visual complexity, arriving gradually so that the audience feels the evening growing under them. By the last thirty seconds, the full company should be onstage, the music should be at its peak, and the audience should be thinking: yes. This is going to be something.
The button. The ending must be clean. A final pose, a blackout, a moment of clear punctuation that tells the audience: that was the opening. Now the evening begins. The button is the period at the end of the first sentence. Without it, the audience doesn't know when to applaud, and an audience that doesn't know when to applaud is an audience that's lost.
What Happens After
The opening number ends. The applause comes — and it should come, because you designed a button that invited it. The lights shift. And the first transition happens.
This is the most critical transition of the evening, and Raoul would tell you the same thing. The shift from the opening number to the second number is where the revue announces its vocabulary. How do we move? How fast? How does one world become another? The audience learns the grammar of the evening in this single transition. If it's clumsy — a long blackout, an awkward scene change, a dead space — the promise of the opening is immediately broken. If it's seamless — a crossover, a transformation, a lighting shift that carries the audience into the next world without a stumble — the evening is launched.
I used to spend more time on the transition OUT of the opening number than on the opening itself. Because the opening, if it's right, takes care of itself. The energy carries it, the company carries it, the music carries it. But the transition to the second number is where the craft lives. It's where the audience decides, without knowing they're deciding, whether they trust you.
The Second Number
I know this piece is called "The Opening Number," but I cannot talk about the opening without talking about what follows it, because they are a unit. The opening is the question. The second number is the answer.
If the opening is big, bright, company-sized — and it should be — then the second number must be a contrast. Something smaller. Something specific. The opening said we are here. The second number says and this is what we can do.
This is where I would put my first real showcase — the number that makes the audience sit up and pay attention to a specific performer, a specific talent, a specific kind of magic. A comedian with a solo spot. A singer with a torch song. A dance piece that's more intimate, more detailed, more personal than the opening could afford to be.
The contrast between the big opening and the specific second number teaches the audience the first law of the revue: anything can happen next. And once they've learned that law — once they understand that the evening will move freely between scale and intimacy, company and solo, spectacle and simplicity — they surrender to it. They stop trying to predict what's coming. They start trusting the program. They start trusting you.
That trust is what the opening number earns. Not applause. Not excitement. Trust.
Everything else follows from it.
This is Part 7 of "The Anatomy of a Revue," a ten-part series by John Murray Anderson and Raoul Pène du Bois. Previous: Raoul on costume as spectacle. Next: Raoul on dressing a bare stage.