What type of comedy is, “the man who came to dinner”?”
Take a sixty-two-year-old screwball comedy classic by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart. Give director Jerry Zaks the go-ahead to cast it as if it were 1939 — with a luxurious cast of 23 actors, plus a Christmas choir, a miniature city of cockroaches (six penguins, unseen exept on the program cover)! Cast one of the theater’s reigning comics, Nathan Lane, as The Man Who Came to Dinner. Put it all together and it looks like just the ticket to initiate the Roundabout Theatre Company’s luxurious new home. Okay, so it is somewhat dated with neither the stated or the veiled references to celebrities circa 1939 likely to mean much to young theater audiences. What’s more, as lavishly produced as it is, the comedy takes off rather sluggishly. But hang in there. There’s still plenty of fun left in the situation that develops when a dinner party for a visiting celebrity, Sheridan Whiteside (Nathan Lane) turns from social coup for Mr. and Mrs. Stanley (Linda Stephens and Terry Beaver doing a bang-
* Director: William Keighley * AMG Rating: starstarstarstar * Genre: Comedy * Movie Type: Screwball Comedy, Ensemble Film * Themes: Culture Clash, Fish Out of Water, Nothing Goes Right * Main Cast: Bette Davis, Ann Sheridan, Monty Woolley, Billie Burke, Jimmy Durante, Richard Travis * Release Year: 1941 * Country: US * Run Time: 112 minutes * MPAA Rating: NR Plot The George S. Kaufman/Moss Hart Broadway hit The Man Who Came to Dinner was inspired by the authors’ mutual friend, waspish critic/author Alexander Woollcott. Generously bearded ex-Yale professor Monty Woolley, no mean curmudgeon himself, plays the Woollcott character, here rechristened Sheridan Whiteside. While on a lecture tour in Ohio, Whiteside slips on the ice outside his hosts’ home; until his broken leg heals, the hosts (Grant Mitchell and Billie Burke) are forced to put up (and put up with) the imperious Whiteside. This means enduring an unending stream of Whiteside’s whims, caprices and vitriolic bon mots, as well as
The Man Who Came to Dinner is a comedy in three acts by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart. It debuted on October 16, 1939 at the Music Box Theatre in New York City. It then enjoyed a number of New York and London revivals. The play is set in the small town of Mesalia, Ohio in the weeks leading to Christmas in the 1930s. The exposition reveals that the famously outlandish radio wit Sheridan Whiteside of New York City was invited to dine at the house of rich factory owner Ernest W. Stanley and his family. However, before Whiteside enters the house, he slips on a patch of ice outside the front door and injures his hip. He is attended by Dr. Bradley, the absent-minded town physician, and Miss Preen, his frantic nurse.
