SIR,—Having attended the New York event at which the TW3
team re-enacted their Kennedy tribute pro- gramme I was totally unaware that the evening of January 27 had been a 'nightmare' and a 'humiliating business' until I returned to London and found it thus described in the Spectator by Emma Booker.
' Her contribution to your pages was informed from first to last by a snide and churlish determination to find the Americans quaint, gauche and comic. Thus the distinguished American opera singer who was part of the evening's programme is described with a malevolent gracelessness as 'a stout lady who sang some arias in a red sequinned dress' and in a later paragraph as 'the red lady' crying inanities. Very funny. Very English.
All of us actually concerned with the show, writers and performers, were concerned that the Kennedy tribute, so immediately felt at the time, might now have sounded somewhat small, dated and invalid owing to the time lapse and the cavernous vastness of Madison Square Garden. But we were relieved to discover that the tribute stood up much better than we had hoped for, and that the evening's busineSs was negotiated by the British cast with considerable dignity and effect. If Mrs. Booker found their efforts a 'nightmare' she was the only one I have heard employ these terms and it is very silly of her to superimpose her own suffering sensitivity on to 18,000 customers who appeared quite genuinely to appreciate the offering.
As for the TW3 team delivering 'word after grisly word,' followed by more 'mawkish and sentimental words,' Mrs. Booker might have found the courage to indicate somewhere in her piece that a great num- ber of them were written by her husband Christopher.
HERBERT KRETZMER
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