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Casablanca, the Play
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19175 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
7 / 1991 |
1,910 Words |
| Author
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Herb Greer
Herb Greer is an American writer and playwright who lives in
Britain and on the Continent. |
Rick's Bar Casablanca (original unexotic title: Everybody Comes to Rick's) was a product of the early years of World War II in America. Written for the stage by Murray Burnett and Joan Alison, it was bought by Warner Brothers and adapted as a screen vehicle for Ingrid Bergman and Humphrey Bogart. The film has become a classic in its own right, a quasi legend among film buffs, complete with a misquoted line ("Play it again, Sam") that achieved the status of catchword and eventually, was taken up as the title of a Woody Allen movie that used footage from the Bogart Bergman film.
A Chance Encounter
Why is the play appearing only now, after all this time? Because executives at Warner Brothers "were not prepared to let a classic movie be produced onstage," the script was filed away, in effect suppressed for almost a generation. London producer David Kelsey, who fell in love with the film while he was a boy playing hookey, began to look for the stage version seventeen years ago. After a chance encounter with the author, Burnett, at the Players' Club in Greenwich Village, Kelsey's agent, George Weiser, rescued the original script from Burnett's desk drawer, where it had lain for decades. He then began what Kelsey describes as "a jigsaw of negotiations" with Warner Brothers, which was obstructive at first but eventually agreed to a London production. When the piece opened at the Whitehall Theatre in April of this year, Kelsey had finally realized his dream of putting Casablanca onstage. (In a curious footnote, Kelsey told me that Ingrid Bergman, interviewed about the film in the seventies, firmly believed that there had never been a play and that the film was the creation of Hollywood screenwriters Julius and Philip Epstein and Howard Koch. In fact, the screenplay closely parallels the dialogue in the stage version.)
This production is not an enterprise in which one can envy the actors. Bogart and Bergman are among the closest things to icons that the movie business has produced. The images of the film--that DC-3 engine roaring to life, the agonized eyes of Ingrid Bergman as she leaves with Paul Henried, the grinning Sidney Greenstreet in his greasy white suit and tasseled fez, Sam at the piano, grating "As Time Goes By," and Bogart strolling off into the night with Claude Raines--these are part of my generation's cultural unconscious. Is it possible to respond to the coarser, more artificial ambiance of a theatrical performance, with a largely British cast giving new life to these old eidolons?
The answer is that much of the
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