Welcome to a new Wildcard Wednesday! This week, I’m sharing the latest in my “potpourri” series on midcentury Broadway plays, specifically comedies, that I’m reading for (mostly) the first time. In this entry, as our “1950s takeover” continues in celebration of the recent release of my first book, Great American Sitcoms of the 1950s — which you can buy here (or on Amazon here) — I’ve selected three mostly forgotten titles from the early part of that decade…
SEASON IN THE SUN (1950)
Logline: A magazine writer considers changing his life entirely, including the folks around him.
Author: Wolcott Gibbs, based on his own novel | Original Director: Burgess Meredith
Original Broadway Cast: Richard Whorf, Nancy Kelly, King Calder, Joan Diener, Eddie Mayehoff, Paula Laurence, Anthony Ross, and more
Thoughts: What works best about this piece is its basic logline of a man in essentially a mid-life crisis, or mid-life point of reflection, deciding to change himself and the people with whom he surrounds himself — for instead of the usual version of this tale, where the guy gives up the stable and familiar for the flashy and fun, he’s endeavoring to reject the fast and thrilling “Cafe Society” world that he used to know in favor of the duller and more “respectable” quiet life in the country. That inherent play against convention is comedically appealing, enabling an otherwise predictable triangle to exist in flipped form — where, here, the wife represents the looser, urbane, city crowd, while the “other woman” is the simplistic, provincial, girl-next-door option. However, beyond the premise’s affable reversal of the norm, I’m afraid that the otherwise clichéd nature of this plot — i.e., a triangle being used to symbolize a man at a mid-life crossroads; magazines vs. novels used to represent low brow vs. high — can’t help but remain evident, especially because the lead’s romantic tribulations feel overly convenient and contrived, not uniquely propelled by multi-dimensional characterizations making motivated choices. This is definitely true for the depiction of the women, but even the protagonist, who broods and ponders for much of the play, sounds more like a tool with which to present a thesis instead of an actual human with living, breathing ties to the life he’s seeking to leave behind… That’s not to say the character work is bad, mind you — there’s a host of colorful ensemble players here who are distinct opposite each other and capable of bringing laughs, and the combination of these folks, who represent either of the two different lifestyles positioned in contrast by the show’s plot, yields comic tension that depends on how they’re individually situated in juxtaposition. It’s just that the big ideas themselves, and the big characters who uphold the big ideas, are not as artfully rendered as they could be, particularly in the context of this chosen plot. In that regard, this is a play with a better premise than story, and better peripheral roles than main ones. But with a fine sense of theatricality (it all takes place on a single porch, which I love because that design forces a dependence on interactions between the characters above all else) and a few amusing moments, it’s more successful than not.
Jackson’s Verdict: Okay — interesting enough.
REMAINS TO BE SEEN (1951)
Logline: The murder of an unlikable curmudgeon puts his surviving niece in potential danger.
Author: Howard Lindsay & Russel Crouse | Original Director: Bretaigne Windust
Original Broadway Cast: Janis Paige, Jackie Cooper, Howard Lindsay, Warner Anderson, Frank Campanella, Karl Lukas, Madeleine Morka, Ossie Davis, and more
Thoughts: This suspenseful murder-mystery comedy about a dead curmudgeon has quite a few charms but never fully lives up to the promise of its premise, as it doesn’t cultivate the elements at its disposal for maximum comedic or dramatic effect. Narratively, the basic intrigue of an awful man being stabbed after he was already dead — from an overdose or poisoning or some other nefarious means — is a fun yet familiar wrinkle that asks us to believe multiple people may have had a hand in killing him. But it therefore requires plenty of precisely rendered comic characters with individualized relationships to the deceased, so that there is a rich variety of different, and hopefully amusing, scenarios. Unfortunately, Remains To Be Seen struggles to provide those characters and to apply them within story. As a deliberate genre parody that accordingly indulges known murder mystery tropes with a wink (the bumbling cop, the femme fatale with a thick foreign accent, the mad doctor, the Japanese houseboy, etc.), the play doesn’t take care in building a genuinely suspenseful plot with those personified elements, preferring instead to spend time with something irrelevant to the mystery: a romantic subplot featuring the only two players with any real sense of comic shape — the plain-talking singer niece to whom the victim left his estate, and her love interest, an aspiring drummer dweeb who serves as the building’s super. Together, these two — originally played by material-elevating stars Janis Paige and Jackie Cooper — are funny because they seem so out of place in this otherwise strictly-formula genre lampoon, and with both anachronistic lightheartedness, plus specificity as a result of clear personalities, they’re indeed the main attraction of the play — the thing it does best and perhaps should spotlight. But because their job in the A-story is to merely be sitting ducks for a potential attack from her uncle’s killer, they inevitably flounder as well without more help from a better developed mystery and without more support from a more thoughtfully constructed, comedically rich ensemble. Oh, nothing’s bad here by any means (and it’s certainly better than the much-diluted 1953 screen adaptation); I just see so much untapped potential.
Jackson’s Verdict: Above average; could have been great though.
POINT OF NO RETURN (1951)
Logline: A banker whose wife wants him to pursue a promotion reflects on his past.
Author: Paul Osborn, based on John P. Marquand’s novel | Original Director: H.C. Potter
Original Broadway Cast: Henry Fonda, Leora Dana, John Cromwell, Frances Bavier, Bartlett Robinson, Robert Ross, Patricia Smith, Colin Keith Johnston, Frank Conroy, and more
Thoughts: Adapted from a popular novel from the late 1940s, Paul Osborn’s Point Of No Return is essentially another story about a man at a mid-life crisis, or mid-life point of reflection, and its plot is engaging enough as far as this template goes; it’s about a banker whose wife is pushing him to more aggressively pursue a promotion despite his reluctance — a feeling he probes in an extensive reflection on his past that’s spawned by both a sociologist’s published account of their shared hometown and a quick business-necessitated return to said town, where he remembers how an old flame’s possessive father ignited his hunger to prove his worth by climbing the social ranks through financial success. This makes for a fine human drama that explores how the events of our youth shape the path we follow as adults, emphasizing tensions from society’s inherent class divides — even among the upper levels (for instance, he’s “lower-upper” but was chasing “upper-upper” — described as a desire to move from one street to another) — which are exacerbated by a culture that considers ever-upward mobility the sign of personal success. Well, that’s how I imagine it reads in the novel… In the play, it carries over the book’s same thematically rich ideas, but some of the characters feel more wispy and poetic than actual or well-defined when they’re dramatically personified, and even though my copy of the text is labeled a “comedy” on its cover, I’m afraid that I wouldn’t quite put this in that genre, as it’s far more dramatically poised than most we’ve covered in our Literary Society — especially throughout its extended flashback sequences, where the piece’s emotional bent but somewhat abstract character work are most clear. So, while I think the story itself probably constitutes a great novel that I hope to someday read, I can’t say I love the play, particularly in the context of this series of posts, which is primarily focused on comedic works and how they’re arranged.
Jackson’s Verdict: It’s not a comedy, so it’s hard to judge next to the others.
Come back next week for a new Wildcard! And stay tuned Tuesday for more fifties sitcom fun!