And one more stage appearance by Tony Curtis! (I hadn't meant for this to become a topic on the blog, honest. But if we're going to talk about it at all, let's exhaust the topic.) B. Baker writes to tell me…
Since you mention it, the actor's ill-fated stint in Simon's I Ought To Be In Pictures wasn't actually Tony Curtis' first attempt to crack B'way. In the early '70s, Curtis opened in Detroit in an odd Broadway-bound comedy first called Turtlenecks and later re-titled One Night Stand. The play, by Bruce Jay Friedman and Jacques Levy, was in a considerable state of flux during its Detroit run. The reviews were not kind, but to be fair, Mr. Curtis wasn't seen as the show's principal problem — the show's basic structure and lack of laughs were judged as faulty. The show, which also featured William Devane and the always welcome Sammy Smith, was closed by producer David Merrick in Philadelphia a month later before reaching NY; I'm not sure Curtis was still with the play by then.
You're probably always asking for trouble when you title a play One Night Stand.
I actually like Tony Curtis quite a bit. I saw him in the Neil Simon play before his meltdown and he was quite good in it. So was Dinah Manoff, who played his daughter. (I've always liked her, too. My first week on Welcome Back, Kotter, she had a very brief role — one or two lines — and she showed enough talent that there was talk of bringing her character back. They didn't but it was astounding that anyone noticed her at all, given how small her role was.)
Curtis was great, of course, in Some Like It Hot and films of that calibre. I always thought he showed his worth when he was cast, as he so often was, in something that would have been an utter turkey without him…like Houdini. It's not at its core a very good film but something about Curtis makes it sorta watchable. And I thought he was the best thing in The Great Race, though that isn't a huge compliment. We don't have a lot of that kind of movie star these days.