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Theatregoer's Scrapbook

GUT-LEVEL THEATRE
During a recent brief visit to New York, the newly-knighted Sir Noel Coward told critic Emory Lewis that he had seen several plays (including his own Private Lives) but no operations. "I wish I had more time for a hospital tour. Watching operations is my favorite kind of theatre, you know. I've observed many operations in both London and New York, operations performed on both friends and strangers... I suppose I like to see a great  artist at work, and that's what a surgeon is."
[[image - photo of Sir Noel Coward smoking cigarette]]

OSCARS FROM BROADWAY
Among 82 major nominations for the Academy Awards this year, 24 (roughly 30 percent) went to filmed adaptations of Broadway plays or musicals. It was the late Maxwell Anderson's Anne of the Thousand Days that swept the field with ten nominations including Best Picture, Best Actor (Richard Burton), Best Actress (Genevieve Bujold) and Best Supporting Actor (Anthony Quayle). Broadway's durable Hello, Dolly! starring 1969 Oscar winner, Funny Girl Barbra Streisand, was nominated in six categories. (Barbra, incidentally, shared Best Actress last year with Coco's Kate Hepburn, who picked up her Oscar for The Lion in Winter, another Broadway transplant.) Other of this year's Oscar contenders that are old-hat to theatregoers: Paint Your Wagon, Sweet Charity, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and Cactus Flower....-Bruce Williamson 

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HISTORIC HAPPENINGS - APRIL
April 6, 1885 - Lyceum Theatre, one of the first with electricity, opens

April 13, 1925 - President Coolidge opens the first Theatre Guild season

April 29, 1929 - Mae West arrested for appearing in her play Sex
- Andrew Herz
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"WRITE FOR YOURSELF, NEIL SIMON"
At one of the George Spelvin luncheons PLAYBILL hosts for important members of the theatre community and prominent members of the business community, Neil Simon (Last of the Red Hot Lovers, etc., etc., etc.) told the assembled group: "When I start out to write a play, I think of myself and my friends....it's only when the play is in rehearsal or on tour that I realize there are other influences and tastes that must be considered."
 
WORDS, WORDS, WORDS
A musical that recently opened on Broadway, features a song which includes in its title that four-letter word. It makes us realize how far we've come since 1907 when Synge's Playboy of the Western World opened in Dublin. In the third act of Playboy when one of the characters used the word "shifts" (referring, of course, to a lady's undergarments), it caused such an uproar that for the remaining week the police were required to control the audience. [[Right-pointing arrow]]

Compiled by Joan Alleman Rubin

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