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TIME: Almanac of the 20th Century
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TIME, Almanac of the 20th Century.ISO
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1930
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30dinner
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1994-02-27
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<text>
<title>
(1930s) The Man Who Came To Dinner
</title>
<history>
TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1930s Highlights
Theater
</history>
<article>
<source>Time Magazine</source>
<hdr>
The Man Who Came to Dinner
</hdr>
<body>
<p>(October 30, 1939)
</p>
<p> In The Man Who Came to Dinner, George S. Kaufman & Moss Hart
had a smash hit on their hands. Tale of a famous lecturer who
goes to a dull dinner-party in an Ohio town, gets hurt, and has
to stay on in the house for weeks, the play's wit is as
gleamingly cutthroat as its antics are gorgeously custard-pie.
The identity of the lecturer is as open a secret as the fact
that George Eliot was a woman. Lecturer Sheridan Whiteside
(Monty Woolley) is an unexpurgated version of Alexander
Woollcott, who has been a friend of the authors' as long as he
has been a legend of the literary world.
</p>
<p> In Whiteside, Kaufman & Hart hilariously held the mirror up
to ill-nature. Crusty, crotchety, mischief-making, selfish,
their renowned invalid badgers all comers in epigrammatic
Billingsgate. Every combat, to him, is a Blitzkrieg. Now and
then, as on Christmas Eve, his gushing soul drips treacle; but
the real Whiteside, from his wheelchair throne, commandeers the
house, forbids his hosts to use the telephone, tries to smash
his secretary's love affair, bewitches the servants, bedevils
his nurse. Snaps he to "Miss Bedpan": "My great-aunt Jennifer...lived to be 102 and when she was three days dead she
looked better than you do now." But the last word is hers: "If
Florence Nightingale had nursed you, she would have married
Jack the Ripper instead of founding the Red Cross."
</p>
<p> Though no stage character but Whiteside has ever made a
wheelchair seem so much like a guillotine, Kaufman & Hart have
filled their flabbergasted Ohio living room with more than
verbal slaughter, have turned it also into an immensely comic
beer garden. While wisecracks pour out of one faucet, nonsense
pours out of another. As a comedy of bad manners, The Man Who
Came To Dinner turns crude now and then. But with Actor Woolley
excellent in the fattest of parts, with most of the jokes
buttered on both sides, and with everything from convicts to
cockroaches to brighten up the cast, the show is comedy in the
best style--all Woolcott and a yard wide.
</p>
</body>
</article>
</text>