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 © 2012 The New Criterion | www.newcriterion.com http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/An-entrance---an-exit-4051
rate this article for your user profile
E-mail to friend
|
view more >
Webcasts
Anthony Daniels on the Euro Crisis
Andrew C. McCarthy: The Muslim Threat
Roger Kimball: The Grim Future of Statism Weblog 
|
add a comment
you must have an account to post a comment. {register now}