Life upon the wicked stage, wrote Oscar Hammerstein, ain’t nothin’ like a girl supposes. I’ll say. Seventy years on, as if to underline the futility of theatrical aspirations, there now seems to be a distinct actuarial disadvantage. A couple of years back, it was Jonathan Larson dying on the eve of his triumph with Rent. Last month, the author of James Baldwin: A Soul on Fire could have woken up and read a rave review in the Times of his first major New York production. Unfortunately, he didn’t wake up at all: he had fallen into a coma and died later that day. Howard Simon was thirty-seven, more or less the same age as Larson.

When the fates play a trick most contemporary dramatists would recoil from using, it’s tempting to ponder what they mean by it. In 1980, when Gower Champion, with the impeccable timing that characterized his best work, expired a few hours before the curtain rose on...

 

A Message from the Editors

Your donation sustains our efforts to inspire joyous rediscoveries.

Popular Right Now