Word: broadway
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Henry, who won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 1980 when he was with the Boston Globe, delights in his visits to Way-Off Broadway?regional theaters where the work may lack Broadway sheen, but can be imaginative and daring. "My predecessor at TIME, Ted Kalem, used to say, 'When I go to a theater in Cleveland, they don't ask what's happening in Detroit.' Well, times have changed, and now when I go to Ashland, Ore., they do ask me what's happening in San Diego...
Neil Simon not only wrote that scene at the heart of his new play, Broadway Bound, which opened on Broadway last week, he also lived its essence. Sometimes when his mother told the story, her partner was George Raft, sometimes it was George Burns. "I heard it twisted around so many ways," he says. "It could have been Rudolph Valentino." Nonetheless, the poignant sweetness of her recollections and the faintly acrid aftertaste of his own uneasy detachment flavored Simon's adolescence. As he rose during adulthood from deprivation to celebrity, creating hit TV shows, then dozens of gag-laden Broadway...
Perhaps the most dramatic instance of rewriting in Simon's entire career is the scene of mother and son dancing in Broadway Bound. There was no hint of it in the original version. Instead there was a scene between Eugene and his girlfriend Josie, a character intended to represent Simon's first wife. Early in rehearsals it became apparent the scene was not working. "I realized it was in the wrong play," says Simon. "Some other time I will write about Joan. She needs a whole play to herself. Right then I had the idea of a scene between Eugene...
...Christmas Day. Next Simon wrote 1985's Biloxi Blues, an astringent look at World War II Army recruits (including himself) whose macho bravado often obscured a lack of true moral courage. It won what he considered an "overdue" Tony for best play?it was his 21st Broadway production?and it too may become a movie...
...Simon is back on Broadway, where he is the only living playwright to have had a theater named for him. He rounds out his autobiographical trilogy with Broadway Bound, a tough and unsettling recollection of the breakup of his parents' marriage and of how he walked out on that wreckage to launch his own career. The play's central image, its emotional climax, is that long-contemplated connection of mother and son, talking and dancing and?for just a moment?spiritually touching. "Until I wrote it," says Simon, "I had not fully resolved how I truly felt about my mother...