The Beauty Part

Last updated
The Beauty Part
Written by S. J. Perelman
Date premieredDecember 26, 1962 (1962-12-26)
Place premiered Music Box Theatre
New York City
Original languageEnglish
Genre Comedy

The Beauty Part is a 1962 stage play by S. J. Perelman.

Contents

Production history

After the success of "Malice in Wonderland," a 1959 episode of the Omnibus television series based on S. J. Perelman's New Yorker humor pieces, Perelman began developing a similar project for the stage. [1] The show consisted of satirical sketches loosely themed around what Perelman saw as "the widespread yearning for creativity" among untalented members of the American public; he pointed to an incident wherein an elevator operator told him "I'm having trouble with my second act." [2] [3]

In the summer of 1961, The Beauty Part had a pre-Broadway tryout at the Bucks County Playhouse in New Hope, Pennsylvania. The production starred Bert Lahr, who played five roles over the course of the evening: a scheming Hollywood producer, a lecherous garbage-disposal magnate, an enfeebled millionaire, a fame-hungry judge, and a female editor of erotica. [4] Perelman did "at least" 10 rewrites of the script before a heavily altered version of the play opened on Broadway on December 26, 1962 at the Music Box Theatre, with a cast that included Lahr, Alice Ghostley, Charlotte Rae, and Larry Hagman. [1]

The Beauty Part opened during the 1962-1963 New York City newspaper strike, meaning that very few reviews appeared and the play could not be advertised in print. [5] Producer Michael Ellis attempted to promote the show via skywriting and fliers distributed in cigar stores, but his efforts were unsuccessful and the show closed on March 9, 1963 after 85 performances. [1] Lahr and Ghostley were both nominated for Tony Awards for their performances. In subsequent years, the play's commercial failure has been attributed to high production costs, mismanagement, and the fact that Perelman's dialogue, "steeped in syntactical invention and idiomatic Yiddish," may have been more suited to the page. [4] [6] In 1992, The New York Times observed that "few flops have been as celebrated, mulled over and positively entitled to cult status as The Beauty Part. [4]

Perelman hoped that Peter Sellers would star in a film adaptation of The Beauty Part and met with him in the summer of 1963 to discuss the project, but the film was never made. [1] A 1974 Off-Broadway revival starred Joseph Bova in Lahr's five roles, and a 1992 revival at the Yale Repertory Theatre featured MacIntyre Dixon in four of Lahr's roles. [4]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Geraldine Page</span> American actress (1924–1987)

Geraldine Sue Page was an American actress. With a career which spanned four decades across film, stage, and television, Page was the recipient of numerous accolades, including an Academy Award, a British Academy Film Award, two Primetime Emmy Awards, two Golden Globe Awards, and four nominations for the Tony Award.

<i>Guys and Dolls</i> 1950 musical by Frank Loesser, Jo Swerling, and Abe Burrows

Guys and Dolls is a musical with music and lyrics by Frank Loesser and book by Jo Swerling and Abe Burrows. It is based on "The Idyll of Miss Sarah Brown" (1933) and "Blood Pressure", which are two short stories by Damon Runyon, and also borrows characters and plot elements from other Runyon stories, such as "Pick the Winner". The show premiered on Broadway in 1950, where it ran for 1,200 performances and won the Tony Award for Best Musical. The musical has had several Broadway and London revivals, as well as a 1955 film adaptation starring Frank Sinatra, Marlon Brando, Jean Simmons, and Vivian Blaine.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bert Lahr</span> American actor (1895–1967)

Irving Lahrheim, known professionally as Bert Lahr, was an American stage and screen actor and comedian. He was best known for his role as the Cowardly Lion, as well as his counterpart Kansas farmworker "Zeke", in the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer adaptation of The Wizard of Oz (1939). He was well known for his quick-witted humor and his work in burlesque and vaudeville and on Broadway.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jan Miner</span> American actress (1917-2004)

Jan Miner was an American actress best known for her role as the character "Madge", the manicurist in Palmolive dish-washing detergent television commercials beginning in the 1960s.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Clifford Odets</span> American playwright, screenwriter, and actor (1906–1963)

Clifford Odets was an American playwright, screenwriter, and actor. In the mid-1930s, he was widely seen as the potential successor to Nobel Prize–winning playwright Eugene O'Neill, as O'Neill began to withdraw from Broadway's commercial pressures and increasing critical backlash. From January 1935, Odets's socially relevant dramas were extremely influential, particularly for the remainder of the Great Depression. His works inspired the next several generations of playwrights, including Arthur Miller, Paddy Chayefsky, Neil Simon, and David Mamet. After the production of his play Clash by Night in the 1941–42 season, Odets focused his energies primarily on film projects, remaining in Hollywood until mid-1948. He returned to New York for five and a half years, during which time he produced three more Broadway plays, only one of which was a success. His prominence was eventually eclipsed by Miller, Tennessee Williams, and, in the early- to mid-1950s, William Inge.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">S. J. Perelman</span> American screenwriter (1904–1979)

Sidney Joseph Perelman was an American humorist and screenwriter. He is best known for his humorous short pieces written over many years for The New Yorker. He also wrote for several other magazines, including Judge, as well as books, scripts, and screenplays. Perelman received an Academy Award for screenwriting in 1956.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Estelle Parsons</span> American actress (born 1927)

Estelle Parsons is an American actress.

Lindsay Ann Crouse is an American actress. She made her Broadway debut in the 1972 revival of Much Ado About Nothing and appeared in her first film in 1976 in All the President's Men. For her role in the 1984 film Places in the Heart, she received an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress. Her other films include Slap Shot (1977), Between the Lines (1977), The Verdict (1982), Prefontaine (1997), and The Insider (1999). She also had a leading role in the 1987 film House of Games, which was directed by her then-husband David Mamet. In 1996, she received a Daytime Emmy Award nomination for "Between Mother and Daughter", an episode of CBS Schoolbreak Special. She is also a Grammy Award nominee.

John Henry Lahr is an American theater critic and writer. From 1992 to 2013, he was a staff writer and the senior drama critic at The New Yorker. He has written more than twenty books related to theater. Lahr has been called "one of the greatest biographers writing today".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alice Ghostley</span> American actress (1923–2007)

Alice Margaret Ghostley was an American actress and singer on stage, film and television. She was best known for her roles as bumbling witch Esmeralda (1969–72) on Bewitched, as Cousin Alice (1970–71) on Mayberry R.F.D., and as Bernice Clifton (1986–93) on Designing Women, for which she received an Emmy nomination for Best Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series in 1992. She was a regular on Nichols (1971–72) and The Julie Andrews Hour (1972–73).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kaye Ballard</span> American actress and singer (1925–2019)

Kaye Ballard was an American actress, comedian, and singer.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Robert Brustein</span> American writer and producer (1927–2023)

Robert Sanford Brustein was an American theatrical critic, producer, playwright, writer, and educator. He founded the Yale Repertory Theatre while serving as dean of the Yale School of Drama in New Haven, Connecticut, as well as the American Repertory Theater and Institute for Advanced Theater Training at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he was a creative consultant until his death, and was the theatre critic for The New Republic. He commented on politics for the HuffPost.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Austin Pendleton</span> American actor

Austin Campbell Pendleton is an American actor, playwright, theatre director, and instructor.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">John McMartin</span> American actor

John Francis McMartin was an American actor of stage, film and television.

The Ritz is a comedic farce by Terrence McNally. Rita Moreno won a Tony Award for her performance as Googie Gomez in the 1975 Broadway production, which she and many others of the original cast reprised in a 1976 film version directed by Richard Lester.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rex Everhart</span> American film and theatre actor

Rex Everhart was an American film and theatre actor.

<i>Foxy</i> (musical)

Foxy is a musical with a book by Ian McLellan Hunter and Ring Lardner Jr., lyrics by Johnny Mercer, and music by Robert Emmett Dolan.

<i>Shlemiel the First</i> (musical)

Shlemiel the First is a musical adaptation of the "Chelm stories" of Isaac Bashevis Singer about the supposedly wise men of that legendary town, and a fool named Shlemiel. It was conceived and adapted by Robert Brustein, with lyrics by Arnold Weinstein and music based on traditional klezmer music and Yiddish theater songs by Hankus Netsky of the Klezmer Conservatory Band and Zalmen Mlotek, who wrote additional music and arrangements, and served as the musical director of the original production. Singer had written a non-musical theatrical adaptation of the stories, Shlemiel the First, which Brustein produced in 1974 when he was the artistic director of Yale Repertory Theater in New Haven, and this served to provide the basic material for the musical.

Stephen Winthrop Porter was an American stage and television director, producer, set designer and writer best known for directing the classics, especially George Bernard Shaw, Molière and Shakespeare. Porter directed more than thirty Broadway plays and many regional, Off-Broadway and other productions over his long career. He was nominated for two Tony Awards and two Drama Desk Awards for his work as a director.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jana Robbins</span> American actress

Jana Robbins, née Marsha Eisenberg, is a Tony, Olivier and Drama Desk Award-winning American producer, actress, director, teacher, and speaker. She has produced and won awards for her West End, Broadway and Off-Broadway productions.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 Herrmann, Dorothy. S.J. Perelman: A Life. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1986. 229-239.
  2. Kanfer, Stefan. "Perels of Wisdom Before an Opening," The New York Times 3 Nov. 1974.
  3. Lahr, John. Notes on a Cowardly Lion. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1969. 304.
  4. 1 2 3 4 Klein, Alvin. "At Yale Repertory, S.J. Perelman's 'Beauty Part,'" The New York Times 10 May 1992.
  5. Meehan, Thomas. "Funny Man," The New Yorker 26 Jan. 1963.
  6. Hampton, Wilborn. "Perelman Aims a Shotgun at Society's Varied Foibles," The New York Times 11 Oct. 1999.