Tag: New York City

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"I wandered lonely [in a crowd . . .]"

I have celebrated a great many anniversaries here; and the birth of William Wordsworth, 7 April 1770, would sure be among the most deserving of my—or anyone else’s—taking note. Yet a far more intimate anniversary is on my mind tonight, hard-driven to distraction as I am in the fear that my old Mac is once again giving up the ghost after two reincarnations. This time around, the ghost-busted machine refuses to recharge, and, in a race against the time of its expiration, I am spiriting away whatever signs of my life might otherwise remain secreted within its juiceless shell. To paraphrase Dryden, I must pound the keyboard while it is still hot, but shall have to polish the issue at leisure, hardware permitting. So, what is the occasion for my ad hoc bowdlerization of one of Wordsworth’s most famous poems? On this day, 7 April, back in 1985, I first stepped into the noisy wilderness of Gotham, this “Tapestry” of sound that Norman Corwin and other radio experimenters captured or recreated for their virtual tours. Touring in the flesh, I, too, became engrossed in its soundscape, walking around town with a borrowed tape recorder and, having returned home, experience it anew in the quiet of the four walls that could no longer shut me up. Compared to the shiny, fenced in theme park it is today, Manhattan was still a fairly hostile jungle during those days, but all the more exciting for being dark and devious and full of unthought-of dangers.

Little did I know that within the course of three short weeks, my rather miserable adolescent existence would get such a kick in the well-ironed pants. How could I ever forget the delights and the dread that awaited the innocent abroad who was far too blasé for his own good? I had a lot to learn, and those twenty-one days were a crash course in survival, which I very nearly flunked: giving all the dough I had left for my trip to a team of confidence tricksters, being invited by a stranger on the street to see the Modigliani he claimed to have in his mid-town lair and not finding the promised masterpiece but myself violated instead, and, still capable of the love I had never experienced and the trust in humanity I nearly lost, falling under the spell of a charming young waiter at jazz bar on Spring Street who would turn my head and the mousy curls on it into something curiously yellow. The physical scar (previously scratched open here) was hidden from view; but those neon locks signalled to everyone back home that the boy who returned was not the one who had gone out into the world:

I wandered lonely in a crowd
That walked on by with dreads and frills,
When all at once I, too, stood out,
With locks like golden daffodils;
Beside the cabs, beneath the streets,
Alive and dancing (mercy, Keats!).

Indifferent as the stars that hide
Yet shimmer to discerning eyes,
They brushed in Harry’s new-found pride
Against the margin of their lies:
Ten thousand saw them at a glance,
When my head’s tossed, who’s got a chance?

The weaves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling pates in glee:
A fellow could not but be gay,
Show colors true for all to see.
I gleamed—they gawked—yet dreamed no more
What change those locks would have in store:

But now, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in somber mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the sight of solitude;
My older self to memory thrills,
And dances like those daffodils.

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“With hey, ho, the wind and the rain”: Thoughts on Twelfth Night

Well, this is it. Twelfth Night. In Elizabethan England, Epiphany (6 January) marked the culmination of the winter revels, that topsy-turvy escape to the kingdom of Upsidedownia. For me, it is an apt time to return to this journal in earnest by looking back at my own follies, being that the first daft act of the year has me lying in bed with a cold. I am feeling—to borrow and immediately discard what unaccountably has been declared word of the year—decidedly subprime (wouldn’t below par or having peaked do just fine? Then again, it is a banking or business term and should therefore be ugly and subliterary). I had meant well, braving the wind and the rain, walking our dog after a three-week separation. Just a few days earlier I observed that 2007 has really been a wonderful year; in case yours has proven otherwise, I apologize for rubbing it in like so much VapoRub.

It was a year of traveling and theater-going that, a fall from a ladder notwithstanding (as a result of which my right pinky is now more likely to remain extended during high tea) was free of strife, hardship, and disappointment. Sure, there were those seemingly endless weeks without phone or wireless internet, there was a move into town that fell through, and there were a few minor upsets in my now sidelined teaching career. And then there was that summer that wasn’t. “For the rain it raineth every day.” Yes, it has been a wet year at that. It began in stormy Glasgow and ended in a drizzle on Waterloo Bridge in London, where the annual firework spectacular disappeared behind a thick curtain of sulphurous mist.

Perhaps my greatest folly was the attempt at maintaining this journal while away from home (as I was for about one fifth of the year). Much of what I did manage to convey, pressed for time or bereft of a reliable wireless signal, was—watch me resist neologian inanities—substandard. As I have proved conclusively, I am not cut out to be a post-postmodern Tintin, to mention the titular hero of one of the most engaging theatrical entertainments of 2007, a year filled with delights and sprinkled with duds. Among the duds, aforementioned, were a ballet version of Gone With the Wind, which we caught in Budapest, the Angela Lansbury vehicle Deuce, and the death sentence to musical theater, an art form done away with, rather than revived, in the guise of a cheap concert version of itself that is Spring Awakening.

Among the recent theatrical highlights numbered the New World Stages production of Charles Busch’s Die Mommie Die, with the 2003 film adaptation I have caught up since. It had been seven years, almost to the day, since I saw Busch’s rather more conservative Tale of the Allergist’s Wife, starring (opposite Linda Lavin and Tony Roberts) the wonderful Michele Lee. The star of Die Mommie Die, of course, is the playwright himself. Some unnecessary crudity aside, it is a brilliant evocation of the 1960s and the end of the Hollywood era. It is also a darn good mystery—a rather better mystery than Christie’s nonetheless charming Mousetrap.

I am not a lover of camp, which, according to my own definition, is a wilful act of misreading. Die is a careful reading of the state of the women’s picture in the 1960s, the schlock that reduced a number of silver screen A-listers to sideshow freaks.

The heroine of Die Mommie Die is washed up, all right; but Busch does not derive most of his laughs from strapping her into a ducking stool. His play is as much an homage as it is a send-up (catering to those familiar with the histrionics of Crawford, Davis, and Susan Hayward); and it is this careful balance that, despite some vulgar touches, makes his play succeed both as thriller and farce.

Yes, I am rather traditional when it comes to film and theater, but that is not why I did not care much for Matthew Bourne’s Nutcracker (now playing at Sadler’s Wells)—having enjoyed his Car Man earlier this year—and sought refuge at the Prince Edward Theater to take in one of the final performances of Mary Poppins on New Year’s Day. I am not opposed to trying out something new; but I find more pleasure in finding the new in the supposedly out-of-date.

A great while ago the world begun,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
But that’s all one, our play is done,
And we’ll strive to please you everyday.

Yes, I am back, Monday through Friday. And not going on about the weather—until something well nigh catastrophic or at any rate sensational compels me to break this rule . . .

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“Evening Primrose”; or, Attention, Last-Minute Shoppers!

Well, there I was. 2 AM, walking around Macy’s on Herald Square. The department store has been open around the clock for days in what probably amounts to little more than a publicity stunt, and a costly one at that. As I looked around me in the nocturnal crowd, it struck me that folks had dropped in to warm up, avail themselves of the restrooms, or merely to satisfy their curiosity, behavior unlikely to translate into an appreciable increase in sales. Now, I am not a happy consumer at the best of times; I derive little enjoyment from shopping, other than the merchandise I am often too tired, ill-tempered, or tight-fisted to drag to the counter. At that hour, having just imbibed a few gin and tonics at my favorite West Village watering hole, I was certainly not in a position to make any informed choices or last-minute purchases.

Navigating the mercantile maze, I was reminded of John Collier’s short story “Evening Primrose” (1940), as it was adapted for radio’s literary adventure anthology Escape. A distant and sinister forebear of A Night at the Museum, “Primrose” is the eerie account of the after hours goings on in just such a locale (called Bracy’s, no less).

A weary and destitute poet, desirous to break free from the world, has decided to squat, of all places, in the quiet of a closed emporium, where he sets out to make a home for himself behind a pile of carpets. Exploring the premises one night, he discovers that he is not alone.

Those tuning in to Escape on 5 November 1947 were invited to imagine themselves

groping in the midnight dimness of a gigantic department store and suddenly you realize that you’re not alone; that a hundred eyes are glaring at you from the shadows, a hundred hands reaching for your throat, and your most urgent desire is to . . . escape.

They were merely after the contents of our wallets; but I was anxious to escape all the same. The “Evening Primrose” is not in bloom this season. The secret society of non-shopping consumers Collier envisioned would have no chance in the glare of eternal commerce, their struggle for self-preservation crushed by the nightly invaders of a territory reclaimed for a paradisic if parasitic existence.

I was more in my territory strolling around New York City’s outdoor markets. At the holiday fair on Union Square, I caught up with my old pal Kip Cosson (pictured) at the fair on Union Square. My frame being too large for the clothes sporting his jolly, colorful designs, I walked away with a signed copy of his children’s book Ned Visits New York. It tells the story of two pen pals, a South Pole penguin and a New York City mouse, and their sightseeing tour of the town. Department stores, I am pleased to report, did not make the list of attractions. Ned, after all, was feeling “crowded and stressed” and had left his home in “need [of a] rest.”

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Lines of Business: Roxy, the Rockettes, and the Radio

You pretty much have to line up for anything in a busy town like New York City. It is hard to believe that when I first visited the city I did not know how to queue. Not that this kind of orderliness is entirely unknown to the Germans, who call it “Schlange stehen” (literally, standing snake). We used to do it for bread, but we don’t do it for the circus or for the busses and trains that get us there. Perhaps, that kind of discipline is too closely associated with days of famine and fascism, in which more than an evening’s entertainment was on the line.

Anyway. I didn’t mind lining up in front of the Radio City Music Hall to see those gals whose line of business is . . . standing in line. The Rockettes, whose fancy legwork is the highlight of the Radio City Christmas Spectacular, now celebrating its 75th season. Of course, my disorderly mind went wandering. I was thinking about “Roxy” Rothafel, the man to whom we owe this spectacle.

Back in 1925, when entertainment by radio was still in its pre-network infancy, Roxy, then Director of the Capitol Theater in New York City, experimented in on-air theatricals, marvelling (in Broadcasting: Its New Day) that radio was the

great spiritual anodyne of the time. None but the hungry hearts that need it most can appreciate, even dimly, what it means. It is a new sunshine, a new hope in life, bringing with it immeasurable joy. It is all hopelessly beyond the understanding of the blasé who are bored by even the most sensational amusements that modern life has to offer.

According to Roxy and his co-author Raymond Francis Yates (who had already penned the Complete Radio Book),

[t]here is a deeply human side to broadcasting that cannot help but reach far down into the conscience of an impresario fortunate enough to win public acclaim. The searching nature of radio makes this so; radio is a magic fluid that finds its way into every crevice of human life. At the same instant it is seeking out the little family group in the cabin of a snow-covered sand-barge wintering in the dreary North River at Hoboken as well as those who are lounging in the luxury of a Fifth Avenue mansion. The lonely souls in an ice-covered, wind-lashed lighthouse on the North Atlantic coast are fellow-listeners with the humble folk in the murky tenants of New York’s lower East Side. The little farmhouse nestled in the snow-clad hills of Maine, the lonely trapper of the silent Yukon, the patient sufferers on hospital cots, the meek inmates of almshouses, all are reached by radio. To some, radio is but a small part of racy life of varied sensations, but to hundreds of thousands it is a great part of a life of spirit-crushing monotony.

Surprisingly, the enterprising Roxy argued that “advertising by radio does not offer a solution to the problem of making broadcasting self-supporting on the scale that is necessary for national success.” Ruling out “voluntary contributions from the public,” they envisioned “equipment that will confine reception from certain studios to those who pay a monthly or yearly fee.”

He was off there. Meanwhile, I am off again, standing in line for some classic cinema treats (and a bit of art) at the MoMA . . .

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The Hirst Noel

Well, New York City is looking more festive than ever, “ever” starting from the first Christmas I spent here back in 1989. There are outdoor markets on Union Square and Bryant Park, and a holiday fair at Grant Central Station. A departure from the city’s traditional Christmas windows, to say the least, was the above installation at the Lever House on Park Avenue in midtown Manhattan. I recall a Christmas carousel in the window; but this year, there was something else on display that is sure to make your head (and possibly your stomach) turn.

Damien Hirst’s “School: The Archaeology of Lost Desires, Comprehending Infinity, and the Search for Knowledge” (12 November 2007 to 9 February 2008) is billed as a “complex and thought provoking presentation that makes numerous references to art, science, art history, authority, knowledge, culture, religion, and beliefs,” as the curator of the $10 “School,” which took about $1 to assemble, describes it in the handout you may pick up as you walk in from the street.

Lever House, designated an official landmark in 1992, is one of those buildings you walk past without looking up; it takes an installation like Hirst to make you stop and wonder. We had just come from SYMS to pick up a few ties (where else would you buy ties in New York!) when we spotted the glass tanks filled with animal carcasses. Discomfortingly well-ordered and awfully beautiful, Hirst’s “School” is even more disturbing than the rate at which our money is going . . .

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Christmas Shopping in New York . . . with a Certain Tightwad from Waukegan

Well, it “hardly seems possible, but it’s true. Only twelve more shopping days till Christmas.” The timely if rather superfluous reminder, along with a suggestion to stock up on a certain gelatin dessert, was proffered by Don Wilson, the rotund and jovial announcer for the Jell-O Program starring Jack Benny, a former vaudevillian who had put money in his purse by leaving the defunct circuit for the lively, money-spinning kilocycles. On this day, 11 December, back in 1938 the show, incongruously opening with “Hooray for Hollywood,” was broadcast from New York City. Since I shall be bargain hunting in said Metropolis later this week, I am tuning in, however belatedly, in hopes of some free money-saving advice from the old skinflint.

There was trouble in the air when bandleader Phil Harris told Benny that tenor Kenny Baker was not hand-on-mike to provide the customary musical interlude. Baker had borrowed a few bucks, allegedly to see the World’s Fair, which would not open until the following April. Benny offered to fill the dead air pocket with one of his dreaded violin solos, upon which the orchestra threatened to desert (until Phil digs in with “A Pocketful of Dreams”). The oft-belittled fiddler was thwarted, for once; but he did get to play with Jascha Heifetz a few years later (as pictured above).

Even his faithful valet Rochester (of whose hardship and penury I spoke here) was a no-show. He was up in Harlem “enjoying a little Southern hospitality.” No doubt, the gang dreaded having to go shopping with or receiving gifts from Benny, the horrors of which experiences, like the parading endured at Easter (and discussed here) were being documented annually on radio and television, to the amusement of the American public.

“An electric razor for Don, a necktie for Kenny, a chorus girl for Phil,” Benny checks his list. At a department store perfume counter. Benny and Mary Livingstone get a whiff of Springtime in the Bronx. “Oh, yeah, it’s lovely that time of year,” Benny quips, “with the bagels all in bloom.” When Benny is taken aback by the very thought of having to pay $10 for an ounce (or $4000 for a gallon) of something more “oulala,” the impatient saleswoman suggests that he run “some violets through a wringer and make it [him]self.”

It is only the first in a series of humiliations, which also involve a less-than-nimble-fingered pickpocket and a mishandled fitting. “Go back to California and squeeze an Orange,” an ill-tempered floorwalker suggests when Benny and Livingstone exhibit the nerve to ask for the necktie counter.

Best peeled by the thick-skinned, the Big Apple is a tough town, all right. Maybe “Hooray for Hollywood” (for which Benny and company were soon to depart) was not so incongruous an opener after all. Just how pitiless a town it was Benny would learn a few weeks later. In January 1939, the high-salaried comedian who squeezed laughter out of a pinched penny was indicted on three counts of illegally importing over $2000 worth of jewelry into the US. According to Gaver and Stanley’s There’s Laughter in the Air (1945), previously consulted here, Benny initially pleaded not guilty; he changed his mind around Easter and received a 10,000 fine, as well as a suspended sentence of a year and a day.

I, for one, shall be traveling to New York with an empty suitcase. Should it get quiet here in the meantime, as it has on previous occasions, it is because I am being too cheap again to pay for wireless access I insist on being complementary, without my having to order an overpriced cup of coffee.

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Hit and Run: Allan Stevenson (1918-2007)

You have probably never heard of Allan Stevenson, the dead man whose voice is now in my ear. I am quite used to hearing the dead speak. Listening to recordings of old radio melodramas is not unlike attending a séance in which the voices of the departed are being made audible by means of a powerful medium. Mr. Stevenson, though, has not long been what is generally thought of as permanently silent. He walked among the living only a few hours ago, an old man, propped up by a cane and blind in one eye. I may have passed him by on one of my many walks downtown to nearby Hunter College or on my way to see a friend who lived in Stevenson’s neighborhood on East 72nd Street. Absorbed in thoughts, I am often dead to those around me, which is why I feel compelled to lend an ear, however belatedly.

According to an indifferently penned article in the New York Daily News, the retired actor who had performed on Broadway in Maxwell Anderson’s long-running Anne of the Thousand Days starring Rex Harrison (1948-49) and the Phil Silvers success Do Re Mi (1960-62), was killed at 2:36 AM by a hit-and-run driver while trying to cross First Avenue in an attempt to get a cup of coffee, a last friendly gesture to a doorman on his block.

Playing in the theater of the mind some six decades earlier, Stevenson was faced with many perilous situations on both sides of the law; and some of his lives were spent before the conclusion of a thirty-minute broadcast. He had supporting roles on programs like Crime Fighters, a dramatic series promising listeners “master manhunters to match master criminals,” and John Steele, Adventurer. In an episode of the latter, Stevenson played a crooked jockey who has his hopes for a life on Easy Street dashed after riding “The Long Shot” (18 April 1950). It is the story of a man “trapped in the bitterness of the past and [put] face to face with the future,” a man who “learned too late that no one can live alone.”

On NBC’s Radio City Playhouse, best known for staging what would later turn into the Academy Awards behemoth All About Eve (as discussed here), Stevenson was cast in the Runyonesque “Betrayal” (30 August 1948) and, more prominently, in the murder mystery “The Wine of Oropalo” (18 December 1949), in which he played the victim of a deadly manipulation.

In Top Secret, a series of World War II espionage thrillers written and directed by Radio City Playhouse producer Harry W. Junkin, Stevenson was twice cast opposite “gorgeous Ilona Massey” (previously mentioned here). In “The Unknown Mission” (30 July 1950), he played a French baron of considerable wealth and charm whom Massey’s glamorous spy is called upon to eliminate.

“I wish we had proof that he is an enemy agent,” she sighs, “It is hard for a woman, without knowing why, to murder.” The hit-noblewoman seems ideally equipped to carry out the assignment. After all, the young Frenchman has “only one weakness,” she is told. “Women.” His grace, however, is well prepared for the attack. He, too, has murder on his mind; until, that is, he permits himself to wonder whether she might care for him. The two assassins find it impossible to follow their respective orders . . . but the duke’s days are numbered all the same.

A week later, Stevenson was again heard on the program in an episode titled “Disaster in London” (6 August 1950), this time portraying a British intelligence agent who is to assist the baroness to thwart enemy plans to poison and kill the entire population of the metropolis. As is made plain to the listener in one of those Shakespearean asides so effective in audio drama, the Englishman is a traitor, himself involved in the chemical warfare plot.

After learning that recordings of his private conversations bespeak his double-agency, this son of a false hero breaks down to disclose his less-than-ideological motives. “There is no dignity left for you but silence,” the traitor’s mother remarks, only to demand an explanation for her son’s actions.

Programs like Top Secret seem an unworthy memorial to an actor who may have hoped for a rather more distinguished career in the theater. And yet, it is the indignity of his death that calls for an outcry, a voice to expose the infamy of his silent killing . . .

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Laddie of Burlesque: David Hyde Pierce Steps Through Curtains

This one seemed strangely familiar. It felt as if I had seen and heard it all before—which is not to say that the déjà vu was an unpleasant sensation. I am referring to Curtains, the final Kander and Ebb collaboration now playing at the Al Hirschfeld Theatre (pictured). Time Out New York called it ”your grandmother’s musical,” which bit of sexist ageism suggests dentures rather than bite. It so happens, I’m with grandma when it comes to a grand night out. At the theatre, that is. I take in musicals to be charmed rather than provoked, to be tickled or wowed rather than indoctrinated. Give me showtunes I can recall and perhaps even attempt to hum (at Marie’s Crisis, say, the Village piano bar where we spent a few hours of merry sing-along on Tony’s night). Besides, I’ve got a mirror for warts ‘n all.

So, Curtains is really my kind of show, if only it weren’t so obviously and deliberately steeped in Broadway musical history as to evoke other and unquestionably superior ones. A backstage murder mystery, Curtains is set in the late 1950s, which is a fine excuse for pastiche, as is its show within a show construction.

Most of its songs are echoes of the period (“Show People” is something you’d expect to be belted out by Ethel Merman), even though the show being rehearsed seems to date back to the 1930s and the sentimental “I Miss the Music” recalls the to me well-nigh intolerable Andrew Lloyd Webber, especially in the earnest interpretation by the to my ears miscast-for-comedy Jason Danieley. That the show is being tinkered with as its cast is being knocked off seems an excuse for the repetition of an inferior number like “In the Same Boat.”

Curtains, of course, offers its own response to captious reviewers “What Kind of Man?”:

What kind of putz
Would squeeze your nuts like that?

Musicals aside, what the show brought to my mind was The Lady of Burlesque (1943) starring Barbara Stanwyck, which I saw earlier this year (for an itemized list of my movie diet, turn right). In that comedy-thriller, a show must go on while a killer is on the loose and an investigation underway. In the case of Curtains, though, it is not the leading lady but the detective who takes center stage and—despite the obvious handicaps of lacking a leading man’s looks or voice, not to mention a convincing Boston accent—takes it in strides at that.

I happen to have been at the Hirschfeld on the day that the show’s male lead, Tony-winning David Hyde Pierce, lifted the curtain on his private life and came out of the closet at last; on stage, he was busy turning a double life into a single one (negotiating his love for musicals with the business of solving crime), and being single into a happy double (by teaming up romantically with one of the suspects). It might be “your grandmother’s musical”; but its leading man is finally breaking with conventions that seemed out-of-date two decades ago.

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Crude Awakening; or, This Ain’t Show Boat

Unlike the previously discussed play Deuce, this one came highly recommended: Tonys darling Spring Awakening (music by Duncan Sheik; book and lyrics by Steven Sater), with which I caught up during the week leading up to Broadway’s annual awards ceremony. It has been touted as the new Show Boat, the spectacle with a story that revolutionized musical theater back in 1927 (and revived on radio as a musical, a straight play, a musical serial, and a number of burlesques). “Old Man River,” take me now! I realize that I am filing a minority report here; but if this is the new face of Broadway, I just got to slap it.

For starters, that new face is partially obscured by hand-held microphones, props that, along with an audience seated onstage and a blackboard listing the tunes, are meant to suggest, in the by now tiresome postmodern mode of self-reflexivity, that what you see and get is only “Make Believe”—an Epic theatrical in the Brechtian vein designed to be stimulating rather than absorbing. Verfremdung, Broadway style, means to play out whatever is left of a story like a rock concert; that is, by playing to the audience rather than interacting with one’s fellow players.

Spring Awakening is not so much an adaptation of Franz Wedekind’s drama of youth, longing, and disillusionment as it is an assortment of clichés about hormonally-induced teenage Sturm and Drang. This high-Rent production (which won’t break even at the box office any time soon) may well appeal to youngsters who don’t know any better or refuse to listen, and to their parents who assume this noisy spectacle to be happening since it has an energetic and gifted cast that emotes in foul language and jumps up and down a lot, as if out to bring in ‘da punk. In its treatment of sexuality beyond the old boy-impregnates-girl-and-both-pay-for-it formula, however, the show betrays its conservative agenda, acknowledging the reality of alternative stirrings only in the form of comic relief.

Choreographed like an old Britney Spears number and outfitted in costumes left over from a touring production of Ah, Wilderness!, Spring Awakening revels in an identity crisis equal to that suffered by an acne-troubled, media-beleaguered high schooler set to pass out at a Goth concert—and it is just about as cheerful and endearing. “Mis’ry’s Comin’ Aroun’,” showtune lovers.

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The Confidante Game: Trading on That Old Acquaintance

Well, here’s an acquaintance worth making. Old Acquaintance, that is, the Roundabout Theatre Company’s revival of which is currently in previews at the American Airlines Theatre. Judging from the walkers and hearing aids on display at last Tuesday’s performance—not to mention the gas passed noisily in the lobby—I suspect that quite a few of the folks in attendance that evening got to see John Van Druten’s comedy during its original run back in 1940-41, while some of the friends of Dorothy’s we passed in the aisle were most likely on intimate terms with the 1943 film adaptation starring Bette Davis and Miriam Hopkins, two leading ladies on less than friendly terms.

Whether or not you (think you) are familiar with this story of a longtime rivalry redefined as friendship, the Roundabout production is likely to teach you a lesson or two about the nature of that least clearly defined of social compacts and about Hollywood’s (s)elective affinities with Broadway.

I caught up with Vincent Sherman’s soon-to-be-remade melodrama (and one of its radio versions) only after seeing the play, which made me appreciate the stage version’s maturity all the more. Van Druten, who was involved in the screen adaptation of Old Acquaintance, sure learned how to compromise in order to make it in Tinseltown. That he turned his sparkling comedy into an even larger crowd-pleasing sentimental melodrama is all the more remarkable considering that the English playwright’s first drama, Young Woodley (1925), had initially been banned in Britain for its treatment of sexual awakening. Production code conformity in the case of Old Acquaintance—as in most cases—meant turning mature women with careers as well as sex lives into silly girls or stoic old maids.

The silly girl in the Hollywood version is Miriam Hopkins, whose Millie is so envious of the publicity enjoyed her novelist friend Kit that she, however ill equipped for literary fame, turns to the writing of romances. The old maid is Bette Davis, whose romantically luckless Kit is willing to hand down her much younger lover to Millie’s daughter, Deidre, for which sacrifice she is duly rewarded with a cup of human kindness, shared with a remorseful Millie by the fire that warms them when the heat of passion is no longer in the Hallmark cards.

All this bears little resemblance to Van Druten’s original three-act play, a witty, tightly constructed comedy of manners. As one astute online reviewer of the movie points out, it becomes difficult to understand why Kit and Mollie became such old acquaintances once their careers are pushed into the background. In the stage play, it is Millie who, though a trash novelist herself, enjoys Kit’s respect as a keen and candid editor of Kit’s ponderous, overly analytic storytelling. However different in temperament, Kit and Mollie come across as equals, which explains at once their closeness and their rivalry.

On stage, Old Acquaintance echoes La Rochefoucauld’s maxims that friendship is “nothing but a transaction from which the self always means to gain something” and that in the “misfortunes of our friends we always find something that isn’t displeasing to us.” Concurring with the latter, satirist Jonathan Swift remarked about his relationship with fellow authors:

To all my Foes, dear Fortune, send
Thy Gifts, but never to my Friend:
I tamely can endure the first,
But, this with Envy makes me burst.

In the 2007 Broadway revival, Margaret Colin’s Kit is less pathetic than Davis’s, while Harris’s portrayal of Mollie is more sympathetic than that of Hopkins (who reprised her role, opposite miscast Alexis Smith, in the 29 May 1944 Lux Radio Theatre production). If not nearly as assured and brilliant in her comic timing or line reading as Rosalind Russell, with whom in mind the rights to Old Acquaintance were secured by Warner Brothers, Colin is both real and regal. Davis, who was asked to drop her pajamas to expose her less-than-glamorous legs, is matronly by comparison, suggesting that she sacrificed her juvenile beau to play surrogate mother to her best friend’s daughter.

The marvellous Harriet Harris, in turn, hands Millie back her brains. Whereas Hopkins’s character comes across as an impulsive, overgrown schoolgirl, spiteful and pouting, Harris’s Millie is calculating, smart, and rather dangerous (not unlike her Tony Award winning Mrs. Meers, in Thoroughly Modern Millie and her scheming Felicia Tilman in Desperate Housewives). Not content to see her best friend succeed, Millie intends to succeed her in fame and fortune. Her dramatic outbursts are an expression of her frustration when she realizes that the unmarried and childless Kit is not only a better mother to her daughter, but that she might also have been a better, and more desirable wife to her former husband.

If you prefer expensive theatre seats to cheap Hollywood sentiment, the revival of Old Acquaintance is your ticket.

[At the time of writing this I was as yet unaware that, before becoming a playwright, John Van Druten taught in Aberystwyth, the Welsh town to which I relocated from New York City in 2004.]