My longtime buddy Jim Brochu knows everyone who has worked in the legitimate theater in his lifetime and has seen every show. I should have expected the following e-mail from him…
Before I totally lose my powers of recall, I wanted to add a couple of things to the discussion of the original Odd Couple. I think I'm in a very unique position in that I saw Matthau and Carney do it five times together.
One of my high school jobs was selling orange drink at the back of Broadway theaters and my usual theater was the St. James when Ginger Rogers was appearing in Hello, Dolly! But my father took me to see The Odd Couple a few weeks after it opened and it was the one play where he almost got thrown out of the theater for laughing so hard. Truly, when everyone else had stopped laughing, my father was howling and still rolling in the aisle.
Then I became the substitute orange drink boy at the Plymouth for four weeks during the summer of 1965. Every Saturday afternoon, I got to watch art Carney and Matthau go through the play. Carney was like watching a movie. Every performance was so close to the other and it was magical that he kept it looking absolutely spontaneous. Carney was a heartbreaking Felix. Totally vulnerable. Matthau was the slob and did what Matthau did best. The one revelation was the last Saturday when I got to the theater and Carney was out.
Paul Dooley was going to play Felix. Of course, everyone was disappointed after the announcement but quickly it became apparent that Paul Dooley was going to be brilliant in the part. As good as Carney and maybe an edge better in some scenes. It was a great experience to watch those actors. It was like going to a master class.
Of course, I remember the famous story about the rehearsal where Walter Matthau turned to Art Carney and said, "You need to put some balls in this scene!" to which Mike Nichols yelled, "Props!"
Wish I'd seen that show. I did get to see Mr. Carney star in Prisoner of Second Avenue and he was perfect. I mean really perfect. I was told that Neil Simon loved Peter Falk in the role and loved Carney even more.
Never got to see Walter Matthau on stage unless you count the time that you and I, Jim, went to a one-night-only benefit performance of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. It opened, you will recall, with Matthau coming out in a toga and reciting the opening speech — "Playgoers, I bid you welcome, et al…" — and then handing the play off to Danny Dayton to play Pseudolus for the rest of it. I offered to bet you afterwards that by the time they got to "Everybody Ought To Have a Maid," Walter was home in bed.
And here's one of those weird examples of how, as you know, people in my life keep intersecting with other people in my life. A few years later, I became good friends with a comedy writer named Don Segall — not to be confused with the film director — who had a background writing comic books. Don was the producer of that benefit performance of Forum and I asked him how he persuaded Walter Matthau to learn a few lines, go down to the Variety Arts Theater, put on a toga and appear for as long as he did so that the charity could exploit his name to sell tickets.
Don said, "I promised him he could be out of there and home in bed before the first act was over."