7/23/2023 0 Comments Neil simon theater![]() The sweetly funny, winsome story of two honeymooners awakening to the harsh reality of newly married life, Barefoot in the Park not only began Simon’s theater box office reign but kicked off his longtime collaboration with director Mike Nichols. But here are four Simon works we think every theater lover should know. Because he was so prolific, churning out more than 60 plays, screenplays, teleplays, and even contributions to musicals over the course of half a century, it’s hard to home in on his most important works, or even his most important decade. Simon was a four-time Oscar nominee and a staggering 17-time Tony nominee he won three times and received a special Tony in 1975, along with virtually every other honor a playwright can win, including the Pulitzer Prize for 1991’s Lost in Yonkers. For a while it was all Neil Simon all the time - remarkably so given that his mainstream branch of domestic comedy was in conflict with a culture, in theater and movies alike, that was moving fast in the opposite direction. It is probably impossible for those theatergoers who didn’t grow up with Neil Simon’s plays to understand how big a deal he was in his prime, both to the theater and American pop culture. As Frank Rich, the longtime New York Times theater critic, wrote about Simon in a memorial for Vulture, The most famous of these is The Odd Couple, the smash theater hit that became an even bigger movie.īut Odd Couple was by no means the first, or anywhere near the last, of Simon’s huge hits. One of only three playwrights whose name graces a Broadway theater (along with August Wilson and Eugene O’Neill), Simon was known for his long-running stage comedies, many of which were hysterically funny even as they drew on real cultural anxieties and states of modern life. ![]() Neil Simon, who died this Sunday, August 27, at age 91, was arguably the most successful playwright in American history, an icon whose works captured the zeitgeist of American middle-class life for much of the 20th century.
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