Word: kopital
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...handed a program that, when unfolded, is exactly thirty-four inches wide. That's to accommodate the title: Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma's Hung You in the Closet and I'm Feelin' So Sad. Yes, the smash hit of the Cambridge season two years ago, by Arthur L. Kopit '59, has at last, by way of London, reached the New York boards, where it opened not so many days...
Anyone here really interested in theatre either saw the 1960 production or has read the now celebrated script in the Hill & Wang paperback. Furthermore, I and others have had our say about this work and the rest of Kopit's oeuvre on several occasions in these pages. So I need only say now that time has not affected my high opinion of Kopit's vicious farce...
Meanwhile, Kopit is near to finishing a new work, which takes place in the women's and men's wards of "a strange sort of mental hospital," whose inhabitants include a batch of historical personages from different epochs. The play is titled--briefly, for a change--Asylum. Until this reaches the boards, the Phoenix will continue as a profitable asylum...
Kenneth Tynan, the second most influential of British critics (after Harold Hobson), said in the Observer of the production that "instead of floating along with the right impertinent buoyancy it slumped like a leaden souffle.... Of high comic style, in which the play abounds, the production was devoid. Mr. Kopit deserves better than this...
...current New York production has, like most things of lasting value, elicited mixed reviews initially. Howard Taubman of the Times found the play "funny, weird, stageworthy and nonsensical.... If you don't insist on a full measure of sense, Mr. Kopit has a fanciful, droll, lurid way with the theatre." In his follow-up Sunday piece Taubman voiced some reservations about the script, such as that it "has its share of irrelevancies that fall into no pattern of communication," but he concluded that Kopit "may become an important playwright...