"He came into bloom too early." "He never could top it." Top what?! His first production on the stage in New York was a black in Harlem that set the early evening traffic of Manhattan moving one way — north — for as long as the Federal Theatre Project chose to run the play. He topped this with probably the most stylish French farce ever seen west of the Champs Élysées, and the topping for this was a production of that led to the opening of his own theatre, the Mercury, with a production of so vigorous, so contemporary that it set Broadway on its ear. But luckily, only one ear, for with the other it was listening and running scared with the rest of the country while O. Welles, in a Madison Avenue radio studio, was reading his adaptation of H. G. Wells's account of the Martian invasion of Earth.
Orson Welles