Sheridan, O Sheridan

I was sure that I’d written a blog post about “The Man Who Came To Dinner” since moving over here to Medium. I was going to link to it on Facebook, by way of telling people to set their DVRs for an overnight showing of the movie on TCM.

But I can’t find it, so it must have been on my old blog platform — and I lost most of those blog entries. That gives me the chance to ramble on once more about one of my all-time favorite movies. The late Julio Francesconi, while visiting the Times-Gazette one day, once told me he thought I ought to play the lead part in the play. I would love that, if the opportunity ever presented itself.

What a funny, funny play, which was adapted, quite faithfully, into a funny, funny movie.

Playwright George Kaufman was a member of the famed Algonquin Round Table, along with columnist and commentator Alexander Woollcott. Woollcott paid a weekend visit once to Kaufman’s playwriting partner Moss Hart. He was, in all respects, the houseguest from Hell — demanding, rude to the staff, and he even wrote a nasty note in Hart’s guest book upon leaving. Not one bit of this was unexpected; it was just Woollcott’s larger-than-life personality. Kaufman and Hart were joking about it the following week, and one of them remarked offhand that it could have been worse — Woollcott could have broken his leg and had to stay for a month.