I think during the original run, perhaps even more so during previews, there were performances where the audience didn't laugh much. In my experience, they were a minority of performances, but there were definitely audiences that either didn't get the humor or felt it was all too serious and forbidding to be funny or may have perhaps been unsure whether laughter was appropriate.
Re applause for the murder of Judge Turpin: My memory from seeing the original production 10 or 11 times is that most of the time there was no applause, but once or twice there was a small amount of applause. |
