Word: neils
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...When Neil Simon's 23rd play, Broadway Bound, opened in New York City last week, TIME Theater Critic William A. Henry III judged it the best American play of the 1980s. He happily proclaims that news in his cover profile of the playwright, which was written with reports from Los Angeles Correspondent Elaine Dutka. Says Henry: "There is a saying in the theater that there's nothing wrong with Broadway three hits won't cure. In any season that Neil Simon brings out a play, the problem is one-third solved...
...lines always drew laughs. Henry notes, however, that Simon, like many practitioners of comedy, is not an outgoing, knock-'em-dead kind of interview. "He is not a performer. He has more of the temperament of a professor or an accountant. In conversations, what you get is first-draft Neil Simon. The words are intelligent, authoritative and sometimes funny, but not burnished, not like his plays...
...voce, and rarely with a stranger. Director Mike Nichols, who staged four of Simon's plays, recalls attending one in which he had not been involved. Simon greeted him wearing a handsome coat. Says Nichols: "It was an off night. The play had problems, real problems. After the performance, Neil took my arm, walked me down the alley, and said, 'Mike, so you really like my coat?'" Lavin recalls Simon's coming to rehearsal with a bad cold and remarking that even the clothes in his closet were sneezing. When one of Simon's daughters told Silverman, who plays Eugene...
...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...
...from." The crucial scene of the best play of Simon's career took three days to write. But Producer Azenberg knew things would be all right as soon as Simon passed him a scrawled note, now framed in Azenberg's office. In its unassuming way the note summed up Neil Simon, the resilient man, the sober craftsman and the confident artist. It read, "Don't worry. I know...