When I was a kid, the opportunity to touch Broadway came in only a few forms. There was Theatre Arts magazine, bound and boxed on the west side of Northeasterns John Vaughan Library and I wore out the pages reading the articles and digesting the scripts which came complete in each issue, and OTASCOs very limited shelf of original cast albums (45s and 33s) which ate into my limited finances because My Fair Lady cost $3.95 and Lil Abner was a dollar more. The real treat came when either Ed Sullivan or Jack Paar would sometimes offer an entire scene from a current show on television, and I could see Gertrude Lawrence do King and I, or Alfred Drake sing Kismet, or Ethel Merman doing the counterpoint on Youre Just in Love from Call Me Madame. But, what made the biggest impression, the thing that marked me for life, was a comedy team. I dont now why; from the first moment, I never forgot either of them. I adored her. Some of her film work and some of her one-acts are brilliant. He was a true genius. I once sat in a restaurant and he simply walked in the door and back to a private room and it was like a an electric current ran through the place. Everything stopped. Mike Nichols and Elaine May were always theatre to me. I loved his movies: Virginia Woolf, Carnal Knowledge, Silkwood, and The Graduate. No one did a better television film than Angels in America. But his theatre work. . .you had to have been at the Vivian Beaumont to see Streamers to even know how electric a play could be, and Stoppards The Real Thing, a slew of Neil Simon, Spamalot, and Death of a Salesman. He won 7 Tonys for Direction, an Oscar, 2 Emmys, a Grammy, and The AFI Lifetime Achievement Award, the Kennedy Center Honors, and the National Medal of Arts. The Broadway Show, An Evening with Nichols and May opened in 1960. They split and divorced in 1961. Gerald Nachman, the famous comedy historian said of their separation, they left no blueprints or footprints to follow. No one could touch them. Elaine May is 82 and still living in Philadelphia. She was twice nominated for Oscars for screenplays and won the National Medal of Arts in 2012. She and Mike Nichols worked together on the screenplay for The Birdcage in 1996. Mike Nichols died today. I dont know how to describe what I feel. He was a third cousin of Albert Einstein. He was a German immigrant who came to this country to escape Hitler. His work is some of the most important done in this country. On a most personal level, they kindled a fire in me that still burns. Here is one of those memorable television appearances from my youth:
Posted on: Fri, 21 Nov 2014 03:06:12 +0000
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