Despite the sweltering heat inside the Hudson Playhouse during the opening of The Friendly Enemies on 22 July 1918, the audience responded enthusiastically to the comedy and the patriotic feeling. The play by Samuel Shipman and Aaron Hoffman ran for 440 performances. Louis Mann and Sam Bernard, as old friends divided over the pro-German sentiments of one of them, found moments of pathos in their verbal slapstick, which recalled the earlier routines of Weber and Fields.
The Historical Dictionary of the American Theater. James Fisher.