| re: I find his plays amusing but not really laugh out loud funny | |
| Posted by: AlanScott 03:11 pm EDT 09/01/18 | |
| In reply to: I find his plays amusing but not really laugh out loud funny - dramedy 01:29 pm EDT 08/31/18 | |
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| Audiences certainly found them laugh-out-loud funny, as acoot1er says. Some of them don't hold up that well (and, of course, many of the later ones were not successful or only marginally so even when new) and perhaps you haven't seen some of them well performed. I saw 11 of the original productions of Simon stage works, going back to Promises, Promises, some of them with original casts, some of them with replacement casts (or mixes of originals and replacements). So I saw only one directed by Nichols, and I saw that one very late in the run with replacements. I have somewhat mixed feelings about Simon's output, but that his plays got huge laughs — and lots of them — during the period when he was having mostly hits is indisputable. In fact, it's even discussed in The Season that they were trying to cut laughs from Plaza Suite, partly because it seemed possible that the audience came in with a determination to laugh. They'd paid their money to see a Neil Simon play, and, goddamnit, they were going to laugh. But discounting audiences in which there may have been a tendency to over-react, during the period when he was writing mostly big hits, audiences found his plays hugely funny. Even some of the ones that were not big hits, such as The Good Doctor, had hugely funny sequences. I've rarely heard so much loud laughter from an audience as during "A Defenseless Creature" in The Good Doctor as played by Frances Sternhagen and Christopher Plummer. You can't see it in the television production, whether because of the direction or because Lee Grant didn't figure it out (perhaps time with an audience would have helped) or because it needs an audience, but with Sternhagen and Plummer, the audience was screaming. So I don't know which Simon plays you've seen or in which productions, and different people have different senses of humor. I've certainly sat stone-faced at shows where the audience around me was laughing. But despite my feeling that Simon wrote only a small number of plays that have much chance of lasting, many of them played as very, very funny. It may have been that they captured the zeitgeist, but it wasn't just a New York or Jewish thing as they thrived on tour and in stock and in regionals and in the movies. They're not always easy to play. In many of them, there's a rhythm that has to be found, but actors can't just play the rhythm. They have to be real, but also find the rhythm of the laughs. And as I said the other day here, even if only three or four of his plays hold up in another 50 years, that's a lot for any playwright, even if it means that 90 percent of his plays do not hold up. Even if only The Odd Couple holds up, that's something of which any playwright would be proud. |
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