Read Online All That Glittered: The Golden Age of Drama on Broadway, 1919-1959 by Ethan Mordden - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Ethan Mordden
Ads: Link
became the avatar of the new leading man who was not your father’s hero. He had ambivalence, Howard, but also had a glow about him: a redeemer.
* * *
There was a shortage of charismatic actors in comedy. Is it coincidence that John Barrymore won renown precisely when he was graduated from light-comic roles to serious ones, thence to Shakespeare? There was also the problem that, for all its popularity, comedy wasn’t very well written at this time. We find that kind of humor that ages as a pallid charm rather than as laughter, and we find it hard to imagine that anyone ever enjoyed it.
There were five types of comedy, and here are some examples, all hits. First, domestic comedy, centered on marriage or family life, as in Booth Tarkington’s Clarence (1919) or Frank Craven’s The First Year (1920). Clarence, the nerd handyman who soothes the testy wife (Mary Boland), straightens out the errant son (Glenn Hunter), and reproves the flapper daughter (Helen Hayes), was the role that launched Alfred Lunt’s stardom. It was an exhibition performance, both overstated and nuanced and capped by a solo on the saxophone (which Lunt mastered for the production). The First Year, which Craven wrote for himself to star in, is a shyer piece, devoid of flapper and saxophone. It is daily life unadorned: the first twelve months of a middle-class marriage. Boy marries Girl, loses Girl, gets Girl. Nothing else happens, save a second-act set-piece dinner party sabotaged by an inept black maid. “A wooer of the homely chuckle,” the Times dubbed Craven, which tells us why he was chosen to play the Stage Manager in Our Town almost a generation later. As writer or performer, the Times went on. Craven was strong in the “humor of recognition.”
Topical spoof, however, had the humor of novelty, as in George Kelly’s The Torch-Bearers (1922), on the “little theatre” movement of small professional or amateur groups dedicated to staging their own Broadway out in the regions (which included Greenwich Village). The Provincetown Players, to select the most immortal example, brought together intellectuals and artists of visionary content; Kelly’s people are the competitively pretentious small-town matrons—led here by Mary Boland and Alison Skipworth—who exploit the stage for social prominence. Kelly’s tone is contemptuous rather than loving, and it is a historian’s choice irony that The Torch-Bearers became a staple of amateur groups, who mistook Kelly for a sympathizer.
There were as well romantic comedies, like Arthur Richman’s The Awful Truth (1922), the source of the Cary Grant–Irene Dunne film, Hollywood’s classic Comedy of Remarriage. The play reunited The Gold Diggers’ Ina Claire and Bruce McRae. There were situation comedies, like The Whole Town’s Talking (1923), by John Emerson and his wife, Anita Loos, in which a nerdy guy tries to impress his standoffish light of love with pictures of the great beauties he has conquered: Queen Marie of Romania, the Mona Lisa, and Julian Eltinge. 6 It’s not working, so he acquires a fourth picture, of a current movie star, inscribing it to himself in memory of their “happy, hectic Hollywood hours” together. So of course the movie star herself shows up—in Toledo, Ohio—complete with her belligerently protective director. Situation comedy was essentially farce without slamming doors.
More common than one might suspect was stereotypical ethnic comedy, the outstanding instance of course being Anne Nichols’ Abie’s Irish Rose (1922). Setting the new record to beat at 2,327 performances, Abie became a national joke, because not only did no one know anyone who’d liked it: no one knew anyone who’d seen it. Writing the squibs for the theatre listings in the New Yorker, Robert Benchley kept jabbing at the piece, then, sometime around its fifth year, gave up with “An interesting revival of one of America’s old favorites.”
These titles have more in common
* * *
There was a shortage of charismatic actors in comedy. Is it coincidence that John Barrymore won renown precisely when he was graduated from light-comic roles to serious ones, thence to Shakespeare? There was also the problem that, for all its popularity, comedy wasn’t very well written at this time. We find that kind of humor that ages as a pallid charm rather than as laughter, and we find it hard to imagine that anyone ever enjoyed it.
There were five types of comedy, and here are some examples, all hits. First, domestic comedy, centered on marriage or family life, as in Booth Tarkington’s Clarence (1919) or Frank Craven’s The First Year (1920). Clarence, the nerd handyman who soothes the testy wife (Mary Boland), straightens out the errant son (Glenn Hunter), and reproves the flapper daughter (Helen Hayes), was the role that launched Alfred Lunt’s stardom. It was an exhibition performance, both overstated and nuanced and capped by a solo on the saxophone (which Lunt mastered for the production). The First Year, which Craven wrote for himself to star in, is a shyer piece, devoid of flapper and saxophone. It is daily life unadorned: the first twelve months of a middle-class marriage. Boy marries Girl, loses Girl, gets Girl. Nothing else happens, save a second-act set-piece dinner party sabotaged by an inept black maid. “A wooer of the homely chuckle,” the Times dubbed Craven, which tells us why he was chosen to play the Stage Manager in Our Town almost a generation later. As writer or performer, the Times went on. Craven was strong in the “humor of recognition.”
Topical spoof, however, had the humor of novelty, as in George Kelly’s The Torch-Bearers (1922), on the “little theatre” movement of small professional or amateur groups dedicated to staging their own Broadway out in the regions (which included Greenwich Village). The Provincetown Players, to select the most immortal example, brought together intellectuals and artists of visionary content; Kelly’s people are the competitively pretentious small-town matrons—led here by Mary Boland and Alison Skipworth—who exploit the stage for social prominence. Kelly’s tone is contemptuous rather than loving, and it is a historian’s choice irony that The Torch-Bearers became a staple of amateur groups, who mistook Kelly for a sympathizer.
There were as well romantic comedies, like Arthur Richman’s The Awful Truth (1922), the source of the Cary Grant–Irene Dunne film, Hollywood’s classic Comedy of Remarriage. The play reunited The Gold Diggers’ Ina Claire and Bruce McRae. There were situation comedies, like The Whole Town’s Talking (1923), by John Emerson and his wife, Anita Loos, in which a nerdy guy tries to impress his standoffish light of love with pictures of the great beauties he has conquered: Queen Marie of Romania, the Mona Lisa, and Julian Eltinge. 6 It’s not working, so he acquires a fourth picture, of a current movie star, inscribing it to himself in memory of their “happy, hectic Hollywood hours” together. So of course the movie star herself shows up—in Toledo, Ohio—complete with her belligerently protective director. Situation comedy was essentially farce without slamming doors.
More common than one might suspect was stereotypical ethnic comedy, the outstanding instance of course being Anne Nichols’ Abie’s Irish Rose (1922). Setting the new record to beat at 2,327 performances, Abie became a national joke, because not only did no one know anyone who’d liked it: no one knew anyone who’d seen it. Writing the squibs for the theatre listings in the New Yorker, Robert Benchley kept jabbing at the piece, then, sometime around its fifth year, gave up with “An interesting revival of one of America’s old favorites.”
These titles have more in common
Similar Books
