The play first had some tryout runs, including in upstate New York and Philadelphia in January–February 1920, but a middling reception delayed a planned Broadway debut. Originally slated for the
Selwyns, they lost confidence in it and gave it up, and Kummer decided to finance it herself. The play debuted at the smaller venue 300 seat Punch and Judy Theatre on Broadway on November 23, 1920. It was a decent success and ran into June 1921 for a total run of 228 performances. Critic
Burns Mantle's annual review of plays called it "a smartly written and splendidly entertaining little comedy ... in which
Roland Young's performance was highly commended."
Alexander Woollcott deemed it "a kind of airy and capricious nonsense which was familiar enough in the best of
Oscar Wilde." Writing for
New York Tribune,
Heywood Broun wrote "the best of it seems to us to be the finest work which Miss Kummer has yet done for the theatre, which means that it is far and away beyond the capacity of any other American writer of light comedy, with the possible exception of
Booth Tarkington. Mingled with this is other materials which is distinctly dull." But while Broun believed plot was almost superfluous to Kummer's best writing, the
New York Herald found that despite "flashes of that whimsical wit," the play "was suggestive in more ways that one last night of entertaining amateur theatricals" and the "dramatic crisis" of the play was "quite flat." The play was popular in stock productions into the 1940s. ==Original Broadway cast==