My favorite non-musical play — and almost the first one I saw live in a theater — is/was The Odd Couple by Neil Simon. Alas, I did not have the thrill, and I'm sure it was one, of seeing Walter Matthau and Art Carney in the leads. The first time I saw The Odd Couple was at the Ivar Theater in Hollywood around 1967 and it starred Jesse White as Oscar and Roy Stuart (the skinny lieutenant on Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C.) as Felix. I laughed so hard that, the next day, I had to run out and purchase a copy of the play so I could read the lines I'd missed.
Since then, I've seen more than a dozen incarnations of The Odd Couple, not counting the wonderful movie and the highly-variable situation comedy. The worst was probably a touring company starring Tony Randall and Jack Klugman — bad, not because of them but because a feeble sound system rendered half the lines inaudible and hissy. (This was before Mr. Klugman's vocal problems. He sounds now like did on that stage.) It wasn't so terrible for me since I knew every line by heart but at intermission, my date had to ask if we could leave…and we did, along with much of the audience.
Or maybe the worst was the "female" version with Rita Moreno as Olive and Sally Struthers as Florence. This was a rewrite Mr. Simon did in '86 and not, I'm afraid, a successful one. Among the problems was that the gender switch was not fully reflexive. In the original, Felix began acting somewhat like Oscar's wife, cooking for him and complaining about how unappreciated he was when Oscar came home late for dinner. In the distaff version, however, Florence did not become Olive's husband or vice-versa, and it was hard to see what all the screaming was about. The best moments, as I recall, came from the wholly-new material and involved two male Hispanic flight attendants — Manolo and Jesus Costazuela — who displaced Gwen and Cecily Pigeon.
No, I thought, it didn't work. The Odd Couple is just about the perfect comedy and it should remain just as Mr. Simon wrote it. Maybe.
Much to my amazement and probably yours, Neil Simon has rewritten The Odd Couple. A new, "updated" version will have a tryout at the Geffen Theater in Westwood, beginning June 19. The plot, Simon says, is the same but 70% of the dialogue has been altered to make the jokes less dated. I assume this means more than the removal of the automat line and the one about the Magic Chef. Word is that the Pigeon Sisters are now the Costazuela Sisters.
This strikes me as such a terrible idea that it may be a good idea. I mean that. If someone you know who's very smart and rational suddenly said to you, "I'm going to rub cream cheese in my hair," you'd think, "Hmm…that guy's always been very smart and rational in the past. He can't be as wrong as it seems. He may not be right about this cream cheese thing but it's at least possible he knows something I don't." Neil Simon has had some failures lately but his lifetime batting average is still way ahead of almost anyone else's. He must know what he's doing, right? Okay, I'm skeptical, too.
We'll find out in June and, yes, I'm going. I dunno who's in it yet but I have to see what was wrong with the old version and how Simon thinks he's fixed it. He's the most successful playwright of the last century and — who knows? Maybe he'll wind up with an even better version of the funniest comedy ever written. Either that or a head covered in cream cheese.