Such extravagantly jubilant behavior is done all the time uptown at The Met by the snooty set, but Broadway rarely has such nights. Titanic was one. Another was the time Gwen Verdon stopped Can-Can cold with her Adam and Eve ballet gyrations and had to brought back on stage—in a towel, yet!—before the audience would let the show go on.

“It was nice,” conceded Maltby a few hours later, by then all calm and cucumber-cool, at the after-party in the eighth-floor Broadway Lounge of the Marriott Marquis. “Gerry Schoenfeld says he’d never seen an opening night like this, ever—and Gerry Schoenfeld has seen a few opening nights. Calling the whole cast back after they were already in their dressing rooms, undressing—that is something that doesn’t happen very often, I’ll tell ya.”

Two-time Grammy-winning gospel singer Lari White , a Broadway virgin, was flabbergasted by the response. “My favorite part of the evening? It was when I was naked in the dressing room after the first curtain call, and I heard the announcement we needed to get back on stage. ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Because they’re still applauding and won’t stop.’ I thought, ‘Wow! They really did like it.’ So I got dressed in two seconds and ran back out. It was a fabulous night, very special.” It’ll be hard to top her first night on Broadway.

Continuing the strong jaw-line of the macho cast was Jeb Brown . (His name, by the way, comes from his initials—John Emerson Brown—and not the Bible.) Brown and White blend nicely into a series of sexy, romantic duets, but his favorite moment plays on another color: “I love doing ‘Man in Black,’ because it’s a song that a lot of people know, but I don’t think they’ve really heard the words recently. They were written in 1971, during Vietnam, and here we are again in so many ways. It has potency and resonance.

“What we’re doing is theatricalizing the music, which is not hard to do because Cash wrote story songs so often. Occasionally, we make a song into a conversation, but mostly we just tell the story and then put it on its feet. It’s surprising how easily it translates.”

He conceded there seemed to be a lot of Southern-fried hospitality out there on opening night. “We’ve been playing to very fantastic houses for a while now, but there was a different flavor out there tonight. It was a Nashville flavor. There was a sense we were performing for the royal family of Nashville. It was fascinating to hear the material go out there and be received in a slightly different way. It wasn’t bigger or lesser—just different.”

Brown wasn’t delusional. Honored guests at the opening included the recording-star daughters of Johnny Cash (Rosanne Cash ) and June Carter (Carlene Carter ) and their son, John Carter Cash . Everyone should have the month of Sundays these three have just had: Last Sunday, Reese Witherspoon picked up an Oscar for her portrayal of June in Walk the Line ; this Sunday, a song she wrote with Merle Kilgore 43 years ago for Cash became the title tune of a Broadway musical celebrating the songs Cash sang as well as the country folks he sang to. Maltby created it as a kind of musical American cavalcade.