Sometimes You Miss Stuff
After spending more than a decade researching Peter Arno, I felt I’d uncovered just about as much as I could about his life and work. The rare and/or obscure material seemed to have finally petered out (so to speak); I believed I’d followed every trail. And yet, seven years after I packed up my research materials, something completely new to me just popped up on Ebay: this cover art for a Broadway play.
The New York Times Theater Critic, Brooks Atkinson reviewed the play in May of 1956, and didn’t think too much of it, saying it “belongs in the bean bag school of script writing. One character tosses a joke to another. The second tosses it to the third. Eventually a joke gets tossed back to the first character… To tell the truth, there are not enough jokes to go around. But something gets tossed every time.”
Alex Gottlieb, who wrote the play, had a long and successful career in the entertainment biz (this according to his obit in the Times) producing “more than 50 television shows and Hollywood movies during his four-decade career.”
Alas, “Wake Up, Darling” bombed on Broadway. It opened May 2, 1956 and closed May 5, 1956 (according to the IDBD).
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Mr. Arno’s A-Z entry:
Peter Arno Born Curtis Arnoux Peters, Jr., January 8, 1904, New York City. Died February 22, 1968, Port Chester, NY. New Yorker work: 1925 -1968. Key collection: Ladies & Gentlemen (Simon & Schuster, 1951) The Foreword is by Arno. For far more on Arno please check out my biography of him, Peter Arno: The Mad Mad World of The New Yorker’s Greatest Cartoonist (Regan Arts, 2016).