Extra! Extra! Your Own Thursday Headlines!

 

Courtesy Art of the Title.

This week's Notable Opening Night is Aug. 14, 1928, when The Front Page opened at the Times Square Theatre.

"From their past experience on Chicago newspapers Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur have managed to reclaim all that is exciting and amusing and fuse it into a scorching play," Brooks Atkinson declared in the New York Times. It was the 34-year-old Hecht's first hit play; he debuted on Broadway at age 22. It was the second hit for MacArthur, then 32, who scored a winner his first time out. Besides verisimilitude and snappy writing, Hecht and MacArthur had the aces of director George S. Kaufman, the grand old man of 36, and producer Jed Harris, 28, reuniting after 1927-28's hit cowritten by George, The Royal Family.

Hildy Johnson (Lee Tracy), a reporter who's leaving the Chicago Examiner and son of a bitch managing editor Walter Burns (Osgood Perkins*), gets the story. Earl Williams (George Leach), a white man alleged to be a Communist and facing the gallows for having killed a black policeman, has escaped and reveals to Hildy that's he's the pawn of the mayor (George Barbier) and sheriff (Claude Cooper). Hildy hides Earl in a rolltop desk to keep him safe and exclusive, stalls his bride-to-be Peggy (Frances Fuller), meets Earl's supposed bride-to-be, hooker Mollie Malloy (Dorothy Stickney), and reluctantly enlists Walter's help.

*Anthony's dad and Oz's grandfather.

My brief synopsis, according to Brooks, is "(passing) over the color, the pace, the incidents and the lusty humor that makes The Front Page so vibrantly entertaining." Atkinson also noted that while Hildy and his peers are part of a play that's "hilarious, gruesome and strident by turns," it doesn't necessarily represent journalism as a whole. "It is a large and varied profession. For the most part it is eminently respectable." In his next line, Brooks stood up for Page's characters: "(they have their own) virtues and ethics and clean speech." A little later, Atkinson complained about gross dialogue: "However photographically true it may be, and however much a part of character and environment, it degrades those who speak it and hear it." That's a professional reporter for you; all the fucking angles.

Alas, I couldn't find out how The Front Page was initially received by the Chicago Tribune. Reviewing the star-studded 2016 revival, Tribune critic Chris Jones called it "a great old Chicago play ... about loving what you do alongside the crazy people with whom you do it." While not the longest-runner of the shows to date that premiered on August 14, The Front Page managed approximately eight months on Broadway.

Page's original production was followed by, to date, five Broadway revivals, two direct film adaptations, the all-time movie classic His Girl Friday, and even a remake of that. It's a story that will keep being told.

Not a great movie, but I love this piece. Courtesy YouTube.

Also opening on this date:

Twin Beds, which opened at what was then the Fulton Theatre in 1914. For 51 weeks, audiences at the Fulton and then the Harris Theatre enjoyed Salisbury Field & Margaret Mayo's adaptation of a popular farcial novel. A New York couple deal with their new furniture, her parents, a drunken neighbor and his wife, a cop, and such on. The fire escape is used, doors are slammed, and you get the picture.

1776, which was revived at the Criterion Center Stage Right in 1997, before closing out the season at the Gershwin. This went zero for three at the Tonys, with nominations for Best Revival of a Musical, Best Featured Actor in a Musical (Gregg Edelman as Edward Rutledge), and Best Direction of a Musical. It lost the first two to Cabaret (with Ron Rifkin as Herr Schultz) and the last to Julie Taymor for The Lion King.

Courtesy YouTube.

The best of times will be next week.