I very much enjoyed the Live From Lincoln Center production of Act One. I had not heard much about this recent Broadway production so I was unaware of how ambitious and lush it was with a big cast and bigger sets. I was also pleasantly surprised that author James Lapine didn't, as a lot of playwrights would have done, chuck the whole first half of Moss Hart's autobiography and start where he meets up with George S. Kaufman.
I was a bit distracted by having two men switch off as Moss Hart — or sometimes both play him at the same time, especially since one of them (Tony Shalhoub) also played Kaufman. It seemed like a needless distraction to make Mr. Shalhoub's part large enough but it took away from a fundamental element of the story: Just how different these two men were. Still, the story moved along nicely, included all the important moments in a very long book and used large chunks of Hart's own words and those he quoted. If you loved the book — and I do — I don't see how you could feel it was not well served.
The play reruns a few more times on PBS and at the moment can also be viewed online at this page. Well worth your time.
By the way: When I wrote about it back here, I originally spelled Tony Shalhoub's name wrong. A few polite notes came in and I corrected it. Soon after, there arrived a non-polite e-mail from a frequent correspondent who finds fault with every political thing I post here — a guy who seem to think the future of mankind hinges on convincing the man who does the words for Groo the Wanderer that Hillary Clinton is indeed heading for prison and that the eight thousand times this has been predicted in the past and she's escaped incarceration is some sort of proof as to how devious she is. (Hey, fella…if she's really headed to the slammer, it'll happen. It doesn't matter if I think it will. You're upset with me because I cast doubts on this "certainty" you've been believing for more than a decade.)
I don't mind folks disagreeing with me as long as they're civil and don't try to convince me that the only source of truth in the world today can be found in Glenn Beck podcasts. This guy who wrote me though stooped to the old trick of "I found one mistake and that proves that everything you say is wrong. He wrote, "You purport to be an expert on show business" — which I don't — and then went on to say, "If you cannot spell the name of the star of a play your writing about, you clearly are not an expert on ANYTHING!!!!!" And yes, he did spell "you're" that way and put in five exclamation points.
I usually ignore these people but I wrote back to this guy that I am hardly the only person in the world who has misspelled the name of Tony Shalhoub. He wrote back that that's not so. Everyone knows how Tony Shalhoub spells his name.
So one of my favorite parts of Act One was the opening titles. Check it out if you don't believe me but there's a title card there that says it stars "Tony Shaloub."