If It’s Not on the Page, It’s not on the Stage

At last, a post where I can write about something I really know a bit about: theater, that most capitalist of all institutions, in a free market world. These days Broadway is a very small cottage industry run exclusively by Liberals to make them feel good. 

In the days when Neil Simon practiced the art of playwriting, you actually had to earn your fame and box office receipts and Broadway was still very much alive and well. And part of the reason The Great White Way—which I love to say, hoping to trigger a lot of people who think even saying the word white while referring to a cultural platform that began with the Greeks, who are not so much white as sort of dark taupe, but darker in summer, so maybe they don’t count as dead white men—but I digress—The Great White Way referring to the part of Broadway that was always lite up at night in a long, wide avenue of delightful evening entertainment was kept alive by playwrights like Neil Simon. I dare even the sourpusses on CNN and the MSM to attend a performance of a Neil Simon play and not laugh at the play and learn to laugh at themselves a bit, too.

He was a tonic for the soul, a virtuoso of the funnybone, a ringmaster of hilarious characters and most of all he was a very knowing lover of his fellow man. People flocked to a Neil Simon play and still do everywhere his work is performed. Someday, I hope he will be recognized as the true genius he was. When you write a play, you have to deliver real entertainment, or the audience doesn’t show up. At least, before the global corporations took over and ruined the art of theater. 

Actors love working on a Neil Simon play. They are as foolproof as a piece of theater can possibly be. But it was far more than that. Your imagination ignited, your understanding deepened, and your acting talents grew, merely by playing his scenes. With a Simon play it was unmistakably on the page, so you had something to carry you when you were on the stage. 

Theater will come back, someday, but it will be a very long time before we see another talent so deft, intelligent and remarkable as Neil Simon. I know he is on that Great White Way in the sky now, delighting the angels, and perhaps even the demons are charmed, as they were vanquished here, for a couple of hours as you watched a Neil Simon play.

What a very great man he was.