Word: simonal
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When Neil Simon and other such budding comedy legends as Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner and Larry Gelbart wrote for TV comic Sid Caesar in his 1950s heyday, they rarely put anything on paper. Instead they sat in a room trying to top one another, shouting out situations and one-liners. Periodically Caesar would halt the schoolboy jockeying to read aloud what they had so far. "Read what?" Simon recalls asking. "We haven't written anything yet." But Caesar had culled the best of their ideas as he heard them and, by a wink or nod, had ensured they were recorded...
...main thing wrong with Laughter on the 23rd Floor, Simon's affectionate memoir of those days, is that this manic style of writing, which he vividly recalls in conversation, is never really seen onstage. The play, which opened on Broadway last week, will delight Simon fans who yearn for the days when he wrote to be funny, without the poignant self-analysis that has enriched such late works as Broadway Bound and Jake's Women. For those who admire these later plays and think he found in them his great theme -- the making of a writer and the moral conundrums...
Greenberg is the president and cofounder of the Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership. He has also written a book titled The Jewish Way, published by Simon and Schuster...
Broadway's abuzz with openings, three last week and 11 more this year, including The Kentucky Cycle, part two of Angels in America, a new Neil Simon and revivals starring Richard Chamberlain, Sam Waterston and Brian Bedford. What's missing? New musicals. Only three are set through spring, each rehashing an old story...
...review so deft that even its target has quoted it with pleasure, Walter Kerr once observed that Neil Simon did not have an idea for a new play that season but wrote it anyway. Jonathan Tolins, a 26-year-old Harvard graduate with Simonesque style and polemic aspirations, had a whale of an idea for The Twilight of the Golds. He just didn't write a play to fulfill...