Tonight at 6:45 p.m. the lights of Broadway will dim for one minute in tribute to Neil Simon, who died on Sunday at the age of ninety-one. His death, due to complications from pneumonia and having suffered from Alzheimer’s disease, was a sad end. To me, he was a personal hero, since he was among the key playwrights I encountered when I first began going to the Broadway theatre on a regular basis, starting at the age of twelve. The year was 1969 and Simon, the author of Barefo

Seventeen years ago today, the actress Kim Stanley (born Patricia Reid) died at her home in Santa Fe, New Mexico, around 200 miles from Tularosa, the city in which she was born seventy-six years earlier. At the time of her death, she had been living in New Mexico for many years, far away from the lights of Broadway, where she had once been one of its brightest stars. Alongside Julie Harris and Geraldine Page, she was considered to be among the finest stage actresses of her da

Last week, I had the pleasure of once again seeing Jerry Bock, Sheldon Harnick and Joseph Stein's Fiddler on the Roof, for probably around the 50th time. Broadway, regional theatre, student productions, as well as my having been in it and directed it (though on two separate occasions), all add up to such a high count. Certainly among my top five favorite musicals, I have to rank this particular theatregoing experience as the most profound. That is because in this glorious ren

The novelist Truman Capote (1924–1984) burst onto the literary scene in 1948 (at the age of twenty-four) with a book of short stories Other Voices, Other Rooms. An overnight sensation, he followed it with other triumphs, including Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1958) and his true masterpiece, In Cold Blood (1965). He also aimed his sights on the theatre, and even if it was only twice in his career, they were interesting attempts. The first was an adaptation of an early novella, The