Word: heavens
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Heaven Can Wait...
...HEAVEN Can Wait is a perfect example of the ever-popular comedy which never seems to go out of style. Harry Segall's original first packed the theaters in 1938, under the title It Was Like This. Three years later, Hollywood snatched it up and turned it into the screen classic Here Comes Mr. Jordan. Decades later, Hollywood dug it up yet again, stuck yet another title ("Heaven Can Wait") on the marquee and milked one more hilarious blockbuster out of essentially the same script, this time starring heartthrob Warren Beatty and the venerable James Mason...
Part of the success of Heaven Can Wait (or whatever you want to call it) can be credited to author Harry Segall's virtuoso incorporation of every popular comedy element known to man into a two-hour script. This play has it all: mistaken identities, fumbling criminals, an adorable romance, a working-class mug playing a millionaire, a boxing match, some good black humor, and a whole bunch of scenes set in heaven with genuine angels...
...plot is ingenious, and goes a little like one of those jokes that begins, "This guy goes to heaven, OK?..." In this case Joe Pendleton, a boxer, (or in Warren Beatty's version a professional football player, but then this play has gone through almost as many permutations as the jokes) is apparently about to die in a plane crash, and a newly hired angel, hoping to spare him some suffering, takes his soul a little early...
...rest of the cast are uniformly good, if occasionally stricken with a slight first-weekend woodenness which should disappear. Steve Peterson, measuring in at somewhere over six feet, uses his own position somewhat nearer to heaven than most to his advantage as the omniscient and condescending Mr. Jordan, but it's hard not to miss James Mason in the role. Patrick O'Kelley provides a deliciously loathsome Tony Abbott, the sleazy lover who tries to drown his millionaire boss and make off with his wife...