“I’ve given you a lot of bad reviews,” he recalled Kael remarking, about the string of movies Simon wrote, a lot of them hits, chiefly from the 1960s into the ’80s. Simon wrote a string of popular plays and musicals. (Mike Nichols, another comedy savant, directed the original Broadway production, as he did several other Simon plays, with Elizabeth Ashley as Corie and Robert Redford as Paul.) “Jake’s Women” was not one of Simon’s Broadway triumphs; it closed after seven months. People like my mother were waiting for the old Neil Simon to come back, but to younger playgoers, his one-liners no longer sounded as fresh.

Source: Washington Post August 26, 2018 21:32 UTC