"Supper Time" is a popular song written by Irving Berlin for the 1933 musical As Thousands Cheer, where it was introduced by Ethel Waters.
[2] The musical was a satirical revue of recent events that had made news headlines with parodies of President Herbert Hoover, John D. Rockefeller Jr., Barbara Hutton, Noël Coward, Edward, Prince of Wales, and Joan Crawford and Douglas Fairbanks Jr.[2] Berlin first met Waters in the spring of 1933 during her headlining appearances at the Cotton Club in Harlem.
[3] Water's subsequent performance in As Thousands Cheer marked the first time that a black woman had ever starred in a Broadway musical.
[7] Jeffrey Magee writing in Irving Berlin's American Musical Theater in 2014 felt that the extended bridge and the return to the principal phrase of "Supper Time" marked a "stroke of songwriting genius" with the repetition of the word 'Lord' forming the melodic peak of the song.
[8] At the tryout for As Thousands Cheer at the Forrest Theatre in Philadelphia, three of the musical's stars, Helen Broderick, Marilyn Miller, and Clifton Webb, refused to take a bow at the end of the show with Waters.
[3] Miller and Webb also complained to the producer of the musical, Sam H. Harris about the presence of "Supper Time" in the score as it jarred with their light-hearted song "Society Wedding".
Wolcott Gibbs writing for the New Yorker described himself as "mildly distressed" by "Supper Time" as it "definitely seemed to belong somewhere else...In Mr Harris's safe, possibly".