Word: simonizing
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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...
Henry, a onetime actor who performed in Simon's Odd Couple and Barefoot in the Park in small New Jersey productions in 1966 and 1967, recalls that the 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...
...Simon responded differently when Photographer David Hume Kennerly arrived on the interview scene. Kennerly, who was official White House photographer during the Ford Administration, shot this week's cover. Says Henry: "I was shy, distant and respectful with Simon, and I got shy, distant, respectful responses. But Kennerly burst in like a rocket and was full of jokes. I was fascinated to see Simon joke back. They got along famously in mock combative style...
...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...
...Howard will take a very close look at Rudd's education policies in the coming months. Of course, if Labor does not cost them properly, or is too cosy with the academics or slipshod about standards, Howard will flay Rudd, just as he demolished Paul Keating, then Beazley, then Simon Crean, then Latham, then Beazley again. Rudd has made a wonderful start in his new job. But he'll need to learn fast how to foment his own voters' revolution if he is to topple the fortified House of Howard...