Word: odd
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...ODD COUPLE, by Neil Simon. Walter Matthau and Art Carney, two middle-aged newly de-weds, share living quarters and watch their friendship go on the rocks for precisely the same reasons that their marriages did. The play, on the other hand, is convulsively successful, thanks largely to deft construction by Playwright Simon (Barefoot in the Park) and daft direction by Mike Nichols...
...shows, it is mostly just something dimly recalled from the grey of the co-credits. But no more. Because Playwright Neil Simon knew him, ad mired his work, and wrote the role specifically for him, Matthau, 44 is now starring in Broadway's new smash comedy The Odd Couple (TIME, March 19) and he is so belly achingly funny as a loutish sportswriter that no one will ever forget him again...
...Goodbye Charlie, the heavy in Charade, and a phrase-chomping gangster in Who's Got the Action, and he picked up a 1962 Tony Award as Broadwav's best supporting actor his haughty portrayal of a French aristokrat in A Shot in the Dark But until Odd Couple, the lead role had always escaped him. Instead, he has done everything else, maybe as Matthau says, "because I don't look like an actor. I could be anyone from a toilet attendant to a business executive...
Along Broadway he seems to be everywhere. The newlyweds are using his skylit walkup in Barefoot in the Park, and The Odd Couple (see THEATER) has just moved into his drab, cluttered flat. In Luv they are leaping off his bridge; gypsies are dancing in his fortunetelling parlor in Bajour. Sherlock Holmes is struggling with Moriarty on his cliffs of Dover in Baker Street; Ben Franklin is still joyously ascending in his balloon; and Dolly is giving her big hello from his Yonkers streetcar. In all, the seven sets account for more than one-third of the shows on Broadway...
...innovation was the development of mobile scenery: his choreographed ballroom stopped the show in the midst of My Fair Lady. But Smith has never been criticized for scene stealing. He just takes them when they are there for the taking. In a viable writer's show like The Odd Couple, Smith abstemiously designs "a set no one will ever notice." It is primarily in musicals with undernourished books that he lets fly. Prime examples: Camelot, which glittered as if it had been ripped from a medieval Book of Hours, and was called by Critic John McClain "the most beautiful...