Word: played
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Came to Dinner and You Can't Take It with You, as librettist of Lady in the Dark and director of My Fair Lady, he will hold top billing in the American popular theater for a long time to come. But he has not had a play of his own on Broadway since the earnest, charming Climate of Eden in 1952. (There were those who loved it, but it flopped.) To get over that humiliation, Playwright Hart began to jot down his recollections. With great skill and an understanding gentleness toward stage folk that all good men harbor...
Though it was written to get away from playwriting. Act One (Random House; $5) in a sense is still a play. It is a collection of fascinating characters whom the author parades before the footlights of his wit and warmth. There is first of all the character who dominated Moss Hart's poverty-ridden Bronx childhood: a grandfather, whom a casual neighbor might well have regarded as simply an embittered, ill-tempered old cigar maker, pathetically attached to his past friendship with the great labor leader, Sam Gompers. But in Moss Hart's telling, he becomes "an Everest...
Legendary Lancelot. There are other characters-Augustus Pitou, the "King of the One-Night Stands," for whom Office Boy Hart wrote his first play at the rate of one act a night; legendary, spiteful Producer Jed Harris, who received Hart while standing stark naked in his hotel suite. But the greatest of all is probably Playwright George S. Kaufman, legendary Lancelot of the Algonquin Round Table. When Kaufman agreed to collaborate with the unknown young Hart on Once in a Lifetime, there started a gentle comedy of errors almost as funny as the play itself. If Kaufman hated anything...
While Author Hart guides his characters through their scenes, he also manages some fascinating asides. There is Hart's quick test of tryout success (when a play is doing well, room service is always prompt, but when it is in trouble, the waiters are always late and the sandwiches soggy); there is Hart's law for the aspiring director (the less sure he is of himself, the tougher he must be with the cast). Hart knows how to interpret all the sounds made by an audience: the implications of their coughs, the degrees of their laughter, the intensity...
star, irked by one mis play, is no hero by a hair...