Word: playwrighting
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...windfall for Bruce Jordan and Marilyn Abrams, who created the phenomenon. In 1976 Jordan was performing in a Rochester, New York, production of Scherenschnitt (Cutouts, roughly), a psychological study by the Swiss playwright Paul Portner; and two years later, Jordan and Abrams were doing the play in Lake George, New York, "To us," says Abrams, "it cried out to be a comedy." The pair bought the rights (for $50,000) and set to funnying it up. They opened the play in Boston to mixed reviews and a flat box office. "We knew the audience was having a delicious time," Jordan...
...relationships are noticeably strained. John speaks in riddles. "In the history of things, maybe there are no such things as thought, we are just dreaming. How do we know the things we know?" As the dialogue hurls itself forward, statements keep surfacing which seem to be guideposts from the playwright...
...TIME WHEN BROADWAY CAN'T lure even Neil Simon back for a return engagement (America's most popular playwright will have his next work produced off-Broadway), it may seem odd to find it putting out the welcome mat for Moliere. Yet the adventurous Roundabout Theatre Company has resurrected two one-act plays by the 17th century French master, dubbed them The Moliere Comedies and fashioned a sprightly, entertaining evening. These are slight, early works by the author of Tartuffe and The Misanthrope, but in a fallow Broadway season, Moliere Lite is better than nothing...
DIED. GEORGE ABBOTT, 107, playwright, director, producer; in Miami Beach, Florida. Abbott was easily Broadway's longest-running hit-from a $45-a-week turn as a soused college student in 1913's The Misleading Lady to the rethinking of his 1955 box-office smash Damn Yankees for its current revival. In between were well over 100 productions in which George Abbott was named somewhere in the program, including a succession of bona fide classics: Where's Charley?, Wonderful Town, The Pajama Game, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Pal Joey. All of them were marked...
Schedrin's lazy, impotent score is loutish when it is not downright sullen. The finale-in which the degenerate playwright Quilty scrambles around his mansion in a drugged stupor, stopping to pound out a few chords on his piano before Humbert Humbert (Per-Arne Wahlgren) shoots him-is a scene worthy of Shostakovich in his manic, trumpets-and-snare-drums mode, but all Schedrin can muster is forced-march noodlings. As for the vulgar libretto, Schedrin wrote it himself but neglected to secure rights from the Nabokov estate. The copyright problems were eventually sorted out with the stipulation that...