PublicPerspective is the PittsburghPublicTheater's newsletter torsubscribers andfriends. Something So Right As playwrights, Lindsay and Crouse clearly had a Midas touch. They produced hits starting with Anything Goes and continuing through The Sound of Music. Life With Father was one of their biggest successes. They talked about how to write the play for two years before sitting.down and doing it in 17 intense and excftl_ng days. In 1939, after being turned down by several prominent directors, Lindsay and Crouse mortgaged their assets to produce what turned out to be a shaky tryout of Life With Father at a summer stock theater in Skowhegan, Maine. They took the play to Baltimore for a further try-out on October 30. The play finally opened on Broadway on November 8, 1939 and ran tor 3,224 performances before closing on July 12, 1947. The stories that were incorporated into the play originally appeared in The New Yorker magazine before Clarence Day, Jr. published them in three bestselling books: Life With Father, Life With Mother and God and Father. In 1947, Warner Brothers released a film version featuring William Powell and Irene Dunne that is re-run on television almost monthly. Is it magic?
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Reviewers of the original production, which starred Lindsay and his wife, Dorothy Stickney, as Father and Mother.found the key to the play's success in its freshness and universality. The Life With Father stories m·ade their debut in the period between the World Wars; the play opened at the beginning of World War It and ran for almost a full decade tilled with sorrow and global stress. Audiences followed Walter Winchell's advice in The Daily Mirror, "Life With Father is indeed charming entertainment when it is not provoking robust laughter . . . Go and enjoy it . . . The happy Days are here again!" In 1967, New York Times critic Vincent Canby called Life With Father "... a masterpiece of vignette writing ... Life With Father is as pretty and pleasant a postcard as anyone received from a lost, bygone era." Wendy Nardi
"Life with Clarence Day's father, in all the late-Victorian magnificence of their Madison Avenue home, must have been a ioyful, glorious and certainly continuously exciting adventure ... Dramatized with faithful adherence to the high spirit of the original stories, we have a stage play in which the senior Mr. Day will ride still further, in his loud and conquering fashion into the hearts of all who see and hear him"
November-December 19B5
Lindsay and Crouse: An Example of Teamwork
-SIDNEY WHIPPLE, N.Y. WORLD-TELEGRAM
Real Thing
Is A Real Hit Faced with the strongest demand for tickets in its history, the Public Theater extended its production of The Real Thing tor five additional performances through November 2. The critics raved: "There's a word for the Public Theater's Real Thing: brilliant! . : . outclasses everything in the first ten seasons!" Ed Blank, The Pittsburgh Press "The Public has mounted a tine production. The acting is superb!" Ann Curran, Market Square Ticket sales for The Real Thing have passed records set by Sylvia Sidney in 'night, Mother and by Private Lives - two of the Public's biggest hits. If you're one of the Pittsburghers who were "Sold Out" of The Real Thing, be part of the Life With Father excitement by ordering your tickets now. Better yet, subscribe to the Public today and don't risk missing a moment of our exciting 11th season. The "Public's off to a 'Real' good start!" Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
"They have captured all the life which bubbled in the stories, and all the richness of character of the man who became simply 'Father' to thousands, and all the comedy which was so tender and at the same time so vigorous. You would never have dreamed any one could do so beautiful a job of translation ... It is gay and funny and, l think, by all odds the most engaging, happiest play in town:' -RICHARD LOCKRIDGE, N.Y. SUN
A glittering quartet: Ethel Merman, star of several Lindsay and Crouse Hits, toasts the playwrights and the composer, Irving Berlin.
Playwrights Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse maintained one of the longest and most successful collaborations in the theater. The partnership began in 1934 when together they revised the book for Anything Goes. They continued to write and produce shows as a team until separated by death. Among the most memorable of these were Red, Hot and Blue, Life With Father, State of the Union, Call Me Madam and The Sound of Music. For these efforts they garnered several Tonys, an Oscar and a Pulitzer Prize. They also co-produced some of Broadway's most outstanding plays including Detective Story, The Hasty Heart and Arsenic and Old Lace. Lindsay had a long theatrical career as both actor and director prior to his work as a writer and producer. His first big break was in 1921 as actor/director of the George S. Kaufmann/Marc Connelly hit, Dulcy. In 1927, he co-authored his first play, Tommy. In 1933, he directed Fred Astaire in The Gay Divorcee, which led to Astaire's successful film career. In 1934, he revised the book for Anything Goes with Russel Crouse and after 1936 they worked together exclusively until Grouse's death in 1966. Lindsay had married the actress Dorothy Stickney in 1927 and they played opposite each other as Mother and Father in Life With Father. Crouse, on the other hand, was never an actor. He began his career as a newspaper reporter and first achieved fame as the writer of a signed column for the New
Public Perspective . Pittsburgh PublicTheater . Page 1
York Post. He always considered himself on a "leave of absence" from the Post. The theatrical aspect of his career began in 1931 when he became the head of the publicity department of the Theatre Guild, a position he held until 1937. That same year he collaborated with Oscar Hammerstein II and Morrie Ryskind on The Gang's All Here. In 1933, he collaborated with Corey Ford on the musical Hold Your Horses. He began his collaboration with Howard Lindsay on Anything Goes and he worked with no one else thereafter. The two men and their wives were more often together than they were with any other people. When Grouse's daughter was born, he named her Lindsay Ann Crouse as a living monument to their partnership. In 1959, the team of Lindsay and Crouse were awarded a special Tony for a partnership that had lasted thirty years and created thirteen shows - many of which were splendid successes. Throughout their long association, they always remained friends. Neither man had the ego that demanded sole credit for their work. They never could seem to remember who had first come up with an idea or written a funny line. Among the many theatrical collaborators in history, Lindsay and Crouse stand alone as a team that remained close friends and effective collaborators for over three decades. Stephen Berwlnd