American productions met with mixed success. The demand for tickets for the first night was so great that the management of the Fifth Avenue Theatre sold them by public auction. A "large and brilliant" audience assembled for the New York premiere on 21 February 1887. "After the first half of the first act there was a palpable diminution of interest on the part of the audience, and it must be admitted that there were times during the course of the evening when people were bored." While the critic had praise for many members of the cast and felt the production would improve once the cast was more familiar with the work, the reviewer concluded that "Gilbert and Sullivan have failed." On the other hand, the American tour, beginning in Philadelphia six days later, met with a much more favourable audience reaction. "That the opera is a great success here and another "Mikado" in prospective popularity there can be no question.... The general verdict is that Sullivan never composed more brilliant music, while Gilbert's keen satire and pungent humor is as brilliant as ever." During the summer of 1886, Braham secretly married J. Duncan Young, previously a principal tenor with the company. In early 1887, shortly into the run of Ruddigore, Braham informed Carte that she was pregnant with her second child, a daughter, who would be born on 6 May. Geraldine Ulmar, the Rose in the New York cast, was summoned to London to take over the role. Gilbert ranked Ruddigore along with The Yeomen of the Guard and Utopia, Limited as one of his three favourite Savoy operas. Later assessments have found much merit in the piece. After it was revived by the D'Oyly Carte Opera company in 1920, the work remained in their regular repertory, and it has generally been given a place in the regular rotation of other Gilbert and Sullivan repertory companies. By 1920, in a reappraisal of the piece, Samuel Langford wrote in The Manchester Guardian that "the gruesome strain is the real Gilbertian element" but "the opera has abundant charm among its more forbidding qualities". In 1934 Hesketh Pearson rated the libretto among Gilbert's best. In a 1937 review, The Manchester Guardian declared, It is incomprehensible that Ruddigore should ever have been considered less attractive than the other comic operas in the Savoy series. The libretto gives us Gilbert at his wittiest, and in