The Man Who Came to Dinner

My Program note:
The seed of Kaufman and Hart's masterly The Man Who Came to Dinner was sown not far from this very theatre at Moss Hart's Bucks County estate.

When The Man Who came To Dinner premiered in 1939, everyone knew it was only thinly veiled fiction. It was in fact a portrait of irascible radio personality Alexander Woolcott, who happened to be the most influential, and certainly the most famous theatre critic of his day. Woolcott's old assistant at the New York Times, and then a famous playwright and Hart collaborator, George S. Kaufman, had promised his old boss-a one-time amateur actor-a play for him to star in. As Bennett Cerf retells the saga, Woolcott had come for a visit. In characteristic Woolcott fashion, he had "bullied the servants, condemned the food, [and] invited friends of his own from Philadelphia to Sunday dinner…" On his departure, he had left the following entry in the Hart's guest book: "This is to certify that on my first visit to Moss Hart's house, I had one of the most unpleasant times I ever spent…" All this was fairly new behavior to the new homeowner, who remarked offhand to Kaufmann how horrible it would have been if Woolcott "had broken a leg or something and had been on [his] hands the rest of the summer!"

With the wildly individual and undisguised Aleck as its center, many of Aleck's famous friends-equally undisguised-filled out the cast. Harpo Marx was the model for Banjo; Dr. Gustav Eckstein of Cincinnati for the quirky entomologist, Dr. Metz; Gertrude Lawrence for the glamorous Lorainne Shelton; and even Noel Coward for suave Beverly Carlton! With such remarkable raw materials, it's hardly surprising that America's leading playwrights came up with a play that has gone to Hollywood in a film adaptation starring Monty Woolley and holds the stage to this day including a recent Broadway revival starring Nathan Lane.