Remembering William Holden who was born on this date in 1918 (died 1981).
I was wondering if Holden and the playwright, also born on April 17, met on the set and celebrated together while Holden was making the movie version of the playwright's Pulitzer Prize winning play which took place in New Hampshire.
Do you know the play and playwright?
"Picnic" -- William Inge?
That was the first thing I thought of, Raggedy.
I love "Picnic", Wandeljw, the dance scene especially, but that's not the one.
Ah, that would be Thornton Wilder and Our Town.
That would indeed be "Our Town", Mac.
How about the play adapted by the playwright for the screen in which Holden was hired to teach the leading lady some refinement? She got the Oscar and I had forgotten that she won over Bette Davis and Gloria Swanson. That was a real surprise. She was great, but Davis was the favorite that year.
You know when you do plays, it's just too easy for me Raggedy!
You know the Oscar winner question too, Mac?
Would that be Born Yesterday?
(I figured I should give someone else a chance!)
You're all too smart.
One more. The movie had a happy ending. The play did not.
In the movie, Holden's Italian father wants him to play the violin. Holden has other ideas and is encouraged by a "dame from Newark" to give up the violin.
Ah, those dames from Newark (which is next door to the town where I grew up)!
That would be Golden Boy, which was
(a) later turned into a Broadway musical starring Sammy Davis Jr. (I saw it about 40 years ago, but can't remember whether the ending was happy or sad -- I suspect sad), and
(b) written by Clifford Odets, who was born 100 years ago this year, and who also wrote Awake and Sing!, a revival of which is opening on Broadway tonight.
Excellent, bree.
I heard the Broadway recording of Sammy's "Golden Boy", but I don't remember any of the songs. I heard that he was great in it. I can't believe that it was 40 years ago.
Barbara Stanwyck was "Lorna Moon, the dame from Newark" in the movie. Odets wasn't available to do the screenplay, so the play was transcribed by four screenwriters. Frank Nugent of the New York Times felt that the "happy ending" didn't harm Odets' theme, but Howard Barnes of the Herald Tribune felt just the opposite. There were a lot of mixed opinions among the critics, but it didn't matter. The picture was a huge success and launched 21 year old Holden to stardom. Holden was grateful to, and remained friends with, Barbara Stanwyck throughout their lifetimes. It was said she would let one of her takes stand, even if it wasn't one of her best ones, if it displayed newcomer Holden to maximum advantage.
Wow, great story. Holden was a gorgeous young man.
The big news on Broadway at the moment is that Julia Roberts made her Broadway debut last night, in a play called Three Days of Rain. I thought the New York Times review was pretty funny, although Ms. Roberts may not share that opinion. Here it is:
Enough Said About 'Three Days of Rain.' Let's Talk Julia Roberts!
By BEN BRANTLEY
In Richard Greenberg's "Three Days of Rain," the existential enigmas and conundrums of faith that always pepper this playwright's work assume a tantalizingly dichotomous form that. ... Excuse me, I was talking. What? How is she? How's who? Oh, her. O.K., if you must know, she's stiff with self-consciousness (especially in the first act), only glancingly acquainted with the two characters she plays and so deeply, disturbingly beautiful that you don't want to let her out of your sight. Now can we go back to discussing Mr. Greenberg's play?
Fat chance. One of the three stars of the Broadway revival of "Three Days of Rain," which opened last night at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater, is Julia Roberts, who is making her big-time theatrical debut. And though Ms. Roberts gives a genuinely humble performance, there is no way that this show is not going to be all about Julia.
Ms. Roberts is the sole reason this limited-run revival, which ends on June 18, has become the most coveted ticket in town. Mr. Greenberg's slender, elegant play from 1997 about familial disconnectedness and the loneliness of intimacy has certainly never known ?- and probably will never know again ?- such fame and fortune. On the other hand, it's almost impossible to discern its artistic virtues from this wooden and splintered interpretation, directed by Joe Mantello and also starring (poor, luckless lunkheads) Paul Rudd and Bradley Cooper.
The only emotion that this production generates arises not from any interaction onstage, but from the relationship between Ms. Roberts and her fans. And before we go any further, I feel a strong need to confess something: My name is Ben, and I am a Juliaholic. Ms. Roberts, after all, is one of the few real movie stars ?- and I mean Movie Stars, like the kind MGM used to mint in the 1930's ?- to have come out of Hollywood in the last several decades.
Lord knows, she isn't a versatile film actress in the style of her rivals from abroad, Nicole and Kate and Cate. Her range onscreen runs from feisty but vulnerable ("Pretty Woman," "Erin Brockovich") to vulnerable but feisty ("Sleeping With the Enemy," "Closer"). Her strength, as far as her public is concerned, is in her sameness, which magnifies everyday human traits to a level of radioactive intensity, and a feral beauty that is too unusual to be called pretty.
Like a down-home Garbo, she is an Everywoman who looks like nobody else. And while I blush to admit it, she is one of the few celebrities who occasionally show up (to my great annoyance) in cameo roles in my dreams.
This probably accounts for my feeling so nervous when I arrived at the theater, as if a relative or a close friend were about to do something foolish in public. I don't think I was the only one who felt that way in the audience, which had the highest proportion of young women (from teenagers to those in their early 40's) of any show I've attended. There was a precurtain tension in the house that had little of the schadenfreude commonly evoked by big celebrities testing their stage legs. We all wanted our Julia to do well.
That she does not do well ?- at least not by any conventional standards of theatrical art ?- is unlikely to lose Ms. Roberts any fans, though it definitely won't win her any new ones among drama snobs. Your heart goes out to her when she makes her entrance in the first act and freezes with the unyielding stiffness of an industrial lamppost, as if to move too much might invite falling.
Sometimes she plants one hand on a hip, then varies the pose by doing the same on the other side. Her voice is strangled, abrupt and often hard to hear. She has the tenseness of a woman who might break into pieces at any second.
Unfortunately it's in the second act that Ms. Roberts plays the character who is always on the verge of a breakdown, and in this part she's comparatively relaxed, perhaps because she has a slipping Southern accent to hide behind. In the first act she's supposed to be the normal one.
I suppose I had better give you some plot here. (Fellow Juliaholics can skip this part if they like.) In the first act of "Three Days of Rain," set in 1995, the hopelessly neurotic ne'er-do-well, Walker (Mr. Rudd); his disapproving and domestic sister, Nan (Ms. Roberts); and their longtime friend, Pip (Mr. Cooper), a perky golden-boy actor, come together for the reading of the will of Walker and Nan's father, an architect of legendary status whose partner was the now long-deceased father of Pip.
In the second act, which takes place in 1960, the same performers play the parents of their first-act characters: Ned (Mr. Rudd), the quiet one (and father-to-be to Nan and Walker), and Lina (Ms. Roberts), a mad and madcap Zelda Fitzgerald type, who when we meet her is going out with Theo (Mr. Cooper), a perky golden-boy architect. Both acts are set in a loft in downtown Manhattan, the apartment shared in 1960 by Theo and Ned. (Santo Loquasto's set, enhanced by a nifty stage-wetting rainstorm, has spot-on authenticity; his costumes for Ms. Roberts don't really match her roles, but then neither does she.)
All the characters in "Three Days of Rain" are analytical, acutely literary types, given to academic name-dropping and the sort of lyrical, brittle and purely theatrical speech that is Mr. Greenberg's signature. For the play to cast its spell (and having seen it in 1997 at the Manhattan Theater Club, I know that it can cast a spell), the language must flow like music: sometimes like nervous jazz, sometimes like Puccini-esque rhapsody. Sad to say, this production never lifts its voice in song.
Mr. Rudd, who has the most stage experience of the ensemble ("Bash," "Twelfth Night"), comes closest to making music, but in a dispassionate, generic, drama-school-trained way. Mr. Cooper (of the television series "Alias" and "Kitchen Confidential") is alternately perky and indignant in the manner of a sitcom actor doing testy and aggrieved. And Ms. Roberts often gives the impression that she is parsing her lines, leaving lots of dead air between fragments.
And yet, and yet. I found myself fascinated by the way her facial structure (ah, those cheekbones!) seems to change according to how the light hits her. In repose, her face seems impossibly, hauntingly eloquent. She has a scene ?- all right, a few seconds ?- of flirtation with Mr. Rudd in the second act that is absolutely charming. And on the few occasions when she smiles, it's with a sunniness that could dispel even 40 days and 40 nights of rain. None of this, for the record, in any way illuminates her characters or Mr. Greenberg's play.
It's a shame, in a way, that this play and this theater were chosen as the vehicle for Ms. Roberts's Broadway debut. In a smaller, Off Broadway house, she wouldn't have to worry about projecting and could perhaps relax a bit. (She never seems to know what to do with her body.) And she really should be playing a romantic heroine, of the imperiled or comic variety. Her parts in "Three Days of Rain" are essentially character parts, and Ms. Roberts is not a character actress.
In his opening soliloquy Mr. Rudd's Walker speaks of a famous house designed by his father, immortalized by a photograph in Life magazine. "People have sometimes declined my invitation to see the real place for fear of ruining the experience of the photograph," he says. Some movie fans may have the same fear about seeing Ms. Roberts in the flesh. They shouldn't. She looks every inch the magnetic (if theatrically challenged) movie star. Fans of Mr. Greenberg, on the other hand, should definitely stay home.
Thank you, bree. That is so funny. I have to read further. I couldn't stop laughing until, " Your heart goes out to her when she makes her entrance in the first act and freezes with the unyielding stiffness of an industrial lamppost, as if to move too much might invite falling. " I could feel her pain.
Yes, poor Julia. I admire her pluck in taking this on. Hopefully, some of that stiffness will wear off as the run progresses. Opening nites (no matter the number of previews) are notoriously tense for actors.
Yeah, read and enjoyed that review, too. (The paper version's title was something like, "It's Her, it's Her, it's Her! And Some Play, Too.")
Hello Sozobe. How nice to see you here.
Guess who's having, other than Barbra Streisand, a birthday today. I think I've commented about her a few times (too many) here. But after all, she was an understudy who made it big.
And guess what movie she played in with Julia Roberts.
