Written by London swaminathan

swami_48@yahoo.com

Date: 8 April 2019

British Summer Time uploaded in London – 15-31

Post No. 6240

Pictures shown here are taken from various sources including google, Wikipedia, Facebook friends and newspapers. This is a non- commercial blog. ((posted by swamiindology.blogspot.com AND tamilandvedas.com))

Anecdotes about Playwrights and Plays

I know the Story!

A librettist accosted De Wolf Hopper at the stage entrance to Weber and Fields.
“I wish to explain the story of my new Opera”, he began.
“the hero is stranded on a desert island, and the natives make him king. You see now the splendid beginning for complications”.
“I do, said the comedian, and I know them well; they are chiefly of a financial character, if memory serves me”. And he fled.

((William DeWolf Hopper (March 30, 1858 – September 23, 1935) was an American actor, singer, comedian, and theatrical producer. A star of vaudeville and musical theater, he became best known for performing the popular baseballpoem “Casey at the Bat“- Wikipedia))
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Merrily We Roll Along’

The play ‘Merrily We Roll Along’, famous for its reverse sequence of events, was a success d’estime but was otherwise disappointing to its author’s George S Kaufman and Moss Hart. Attempts were made to analyse the reason for the plays failure.
According to Kaufman the best diagnosis of the trouble was made by Herman Mankiewicz, who said,
“Here we have this young man; a successful playwright wealthy, honoured, loved by beautiful women, the owner of yachts, sought out by everyone, but the problem is, how the Hell did the poor son of a gun ever get himself into such a jam!”

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Nervousness

On the first night of the performance of One of Douglas Jerrold’s pieces, a successful playwright rallied him on his nervousness.
“I, said this colleague, never feel nervous on the first night of my pieces.”
“Ah, my boy!” Jerrold replied,
“You are always certain of success. Your pieces have all been tried before.”

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Kingship for the Dramatist!

The influence of antiquity is perpetual. The art and literature of the ancient Greeks and Romans is evident in most of the things about us in modern everyday life. Many artists owe their great success to emulating the ancient classics, the masterpieces of many writers are based on the great d dramas of Euripides, Sophocles and Aeschylus. Corneille notably patterned his plays on the Greek idea.
His Andromache is a well- known example. The classic basis of this play earned for him probably the highest praise ever accorded to a dramatist. Napoleon, a great lover of the classics, exclaimed after seeing Andromaque, “If Corneille were alive, I would make him King”.

((Pierre Corneille (French pronunciation: ​[pjɛʁ kɔʁnɛj]; Rouen, 6 June 1606 – Paris, 1 October 1684) was a French tragedian. He is generally considered one of the three great seventeenth-century French dramatists, along with Molièreand Racine—Wikipedia))

–subham–