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TheaterApril 2009 An entrance & an exit by Brooke Allen On Enter Laughing: The Musical at the York Theatre, The Savannah Disputation at Playwrights Horizons, 33 Variations at Eugene O'Neill Theater, and the closing of Forbidden Broadway. “Dying is easy,” the expiring comedian is supposed to have said when asked whether it was hard to die. “Comedy is hard.” Just how hard, no one who has not worked in the business can ever understand, so that when a perfectly executed morsel of lowbrow farce like the current production of Enter Laughing: The Musical at the York Theatre comes along, it is in danger of being taken for granted. Enter Laughing has gone through a number of incarnations. Based (very loosely!) on Carl Reiner’s memories of his youthful beginnings as an actor in the Great Depression, the original play by Joseph Stein (1963) starred Alan Arkin as the goofy young Reiner character, David Kolowitz, and was turned into a movie four years later. In 1974, a score by Stan Daniels was added to turn the property into a Broadway musical, So Long, 174th Street. Despite Daniels ... This article is available to subscribers and for individual purchaseSubscribe to TNC (Print and Online editions) Subscribe to TNC (Online only) This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 27 April 2009, on page 34 Copyright © 2009 The New Criterion | www.newcriterion.com http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/An-entrance---an-exit-4051
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by Brooke Allen On Becky Shaw at the Second Stage, The American Plan at the Manhattan Theater Club, and Sleepwalk With Me at the Bleecker Street Theater. On Jude Law in Hamlet, the Atlantic Theater Company's Two Unrelated Plays by David Mamet, Collaborative Stages's House of Yes, and The Retributionists by Daniel Goldfarb. On After Luke & When I Was God at the Irish Repertory Theater, New York, A Lifetime of Burning at e59e, New York & The Bacchae in Central Park. On A Midsummer Night's Dream at Shakespeare on the Sound and The Europeans at Atlantic Stage 2.  The New Criterion is now optimized for Mobile Devices 
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EventsNovember 09 2009 YOUNG FRIENDS: Tour of an important contemporary art collection November 24 2009 OPEN EVENT: Laura Jacobs reading December 02 2009 Friends Event: The Swallow Anthology Reading Webcasts
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