Mary, Mary: Good Cast and Director Grapple with an Outdated Show
Photo: T.H. Wall
If one looks at lists of theatrical hits of the 1950s and 1960’s in New York , one finds plays by Tennessee Williams (Baby Doll, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof), Eugene O’Neil (Long Day’s Journey into night), Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett’s dramatization of The Diary of Anne Frank, one of the most successful works of the season, not to mention Lorraine Hansberry’s ground breaking drama A Raisin in the Sun, and the Leonard Bernstein Musical West Side Story (1957), all productions that made theatre history. In the 1960’s, the big hits of the Broadway stage were musicals: Hair, Mame, Man of the Mancha, Fiddler on the Roof and the list goes on. It would seem then rather strange to speak of Broadway hits when locating Jean Kerr’s work Mary, Mary among the plays that defined the “Golden Age of the American Stage “ (New York ) of the 1950s or 1960’s.