[John Simon, former theater reviewer for New York magazine for almost four decades (among other gigs), died in Valhalla, New York, on Sunday, 24 November. He was not a theater writer for whom I had a great deal of admiration—and I wasn’t alone in this sentiment. In his New York Times obituary, Robert D. McFadden characterized him as “one of the nation’s most erudite, vitriolic and vilified culture critics, who illuminated and savaged a remarkable range of plays, films, literature and art works and their creators for more than a half-century . . . .” Andrew Sarris, film critic for the Village Voice, called Simon “the Count Dracula of critics.”
[Simon also had no compunction about
savaging actors and even other reviewers in terms that McFadden found “often
meanspirited.” It was this trait that
most offended me: the gratuitous insulting of an actor for her appearance or
his voice. (As you’ll see below, he
disparaged actor Mandy Patinkin, who, for those who don’t know it, is Jewish,
for his “bulky, hulking head, further swelled by a mass of raven hair, [that]
makes him look rather like a caricature in the notorious Nazi publication Der
Stürmer.”
In the same review, Simon also skewered Christopher Reeve and Alfre
Woodard using references to their backgrounds; his remarks about Woodard weren’t just nasty, they were racist..
[Probably, though, Simon’s worst offense as a critic was,
as McFadden put it, that he felt that “the arts in America were in decline, or at
least in a state of perpetual confusion, and he insisted that his mission was
to raise standards through unflinching criticism.” In his 1974 Drama Review essay “Criticism: Four Faults,” Michael
Kirby asserts:
There are critics who actually propose that they are
establishing esthetic standards. (. . .
[T]his is obvious arrogance. It implies
that their standards are correct and are superior in some respect to the
standards of others.) Even when no
claims are made, the results are the same: the values of one person reinforce
or contradict—thereby possibly changing—the values held by others. Individual taste is forced toward the norm or
kept there”
[Kirby, a former New York University professor of
Performance Studies and editor of TDR,: “Under
fascism, one person or party rules; standardization and conformity are imposed
by dictate,” so he decries Simon’s self-proclaimed mission as a “fascism of
taste.”
[As it happens, I had a brief brush with Simon when I was in the criticism game myself. In the late ’80s, I was a stringer for the New York Native and in March 1989, I was assigned to review
The Winter’s Tale, part of the New
York Shakespeare Festival/Public Theater’s Shakespeare Marathon (staging all of
Shakespeare’s plays over ten years). My
review and John Simon’s New York
magazine notice came out on the same date.
[I was aghast at what Simon said about the work! I was so angry—I had already dumped my
subscription to New
York because of his reviews—I decided to
write not only to Simon’s editor, Edward Kosner, but the editors of as many New
York periodicals as I could think of. (I
wasn’t alone: a slew of theater folk also wrote to publications and denounced
Simon’s bigotry and slurs.) At the end
of my letter, I expressed my disgust with the review and the writer and urged “my
brother journalists and critics to join me.”
[In recognition of Simon’s passing, I’ve put together
some of the documents of that contretemps, starting with his New York review and including my original letter to
the editors, along with some other responses to Simon’s column. There are more than I anticipated, so this
will be a multi-part post; Part 1 contains Simon’s review of The Winter’s Tale, plus my review from the Native and columns from a few other papers. Part 2 will go up on
Rick
On Theater on 1 December. Please comeback to ROT for the continuation.]
“LAPINING AWAY”
by John Simon
New York
New York
3 April 1989
[Simon’s review of the New York
Shakespeare Festival/Public Theater’s production of William Shakespeare’s The
Winter’s Tale appeared in New York (then owned by Ruoert Murdoch) on pages
79-80 on 3 April 1989.]
With its eighth production in the Papp
Shakespeare marathon, The Winter’s Tale,
the Public Theater has finally succeeded in going private. Everyone here seems to be doing his own
thing, and these foolish things played end to end spell catastrophe. Take first the idea of the director, James
Lapine, to set a play whose characters have mostly Greek and Roman names, and
who consult Apollo’s oracle at Delphi, in the eighteenth century, which takes
it as far from its intentions as from us.
That rationalist century was as irrational as any, but it made a grand
show of enshrining reason as its goddess—for which there is no parallel either
in Shakespeare’s world or in Lapine’s head.
I imagine the director chose the settecento setting to accommodate both a
huge and a hugely irrelevant reproduction of a Guido Reni painting and a
character from the commedia dell’arte, Harlequin, whom he apparently associates
with Longhi and the eighteenth century, and whom he turns into a sort of stage
manager. This intruder not only hands
the cast costumes from an onstage trunk but also puts on a dumb play à la Hamlet in which to catch the conscience
of another king. (For these inserts, you
have to cut out gobs of text; but who cares about that, right?)
Worse, Lapine (best known as director
or co-creator of recent Sondheim musicals, as well as those of William Finn,
about whom more anon) has presumed to write a new beginning for the play, a
practice that, unfortunately, has a precedent at the Public. Accordingly, the entire play is turned into a
fairy tale told by little Mamillius to his mother, Queen Hermione—which
effectively robs it of all its drama.
Granted, The Winter’s Tale is
one of Shakespeare’s so-called romances; but what makes them, or any romance,
exciting is the ability to make the fairy-tale world real. Lapine’s liminal, antidramatic irony
trivializes everything, not least the subsequent death of Mamillius.
And then some. Parts of the play are gussied up as a
contemporary musical comedy—with music by the aforementioned Mr. Finn and his
usual orchestrator, Michael Starobin—which has nothing to do with either
Shakespeare’s or Lapine’s chosen period, but does fit in with Lapine’s musical-comedy
staging, what with, for example, the auxiliary characters often seated on a
pair of stairways going off right and left from an upstage platform. Sitting behind a translucent red curtain and
half-lit by Beverly Emmons, the flashy lighting designer, these characters look
like a cross between the front-stoop sitters of Street Scene and souls in a window-dresser’s hell. Luckily for them, they get time off when
Autolycus takes a protracted pee where they customarily sit.
Now for the perverse casting and worse
acting. No one here speaks verse as
verse (that nicety has been pretty much abolished at the Public), but more
important, no one even speaks beautifully.
Instead, we get various kinds of palaver, from prosy to preposterous,
that remain utterly unintegrated. The
chief disaster in a close contest is Mandy Patinkin (who should have retired
on his Evita laurels, to be fondly
remembered ever since) as Leontes, the jealousy-maddened king of Sicilia. Patinkin talks in a flat New York-accented
voice, periodically, and usually inexplicably, lapsing into an inaudible
whisper or bursting into an incomprehensible roar. Since, as he himself has said, and briefly
demonstrates, he doesn’t know what to do with his hands, he tends to keep them
behind his back, as if he were handcuffed or an international financier. This, combining with his bulky, hulking head,
further swelled by a mass of raven hair, makes him look rather like a
caricature in the notorious Nazi publication Der Stürmer. When, however,
he stretches out in a vaguely boot-shaped chaise longue, you’d think him a road
company Marat getting ready for Charlotte Corday.
His timing is particularly off, but no
more so than that of his fellow king, Polixenes, played by Christopher Reeve,
the Superman whom trick photography projected into our skies and onto our
screen and stage. He does not so much
speak his lines as gargle with them, in some sort of artfully snotty Ivy League
accent, while strutting and striding in his best Skull and Bones manner. I kept hoping he would transform himself at
least into Clark Kent, but no such luck.
Even more bizarre is the Paulina of Alfre Woodard, visually a cross
between Topsy and the Medusa, aurally (at any rate in the first half) a pretty
fair impersonation of Butterfly McQueen.
If Miss Woodard weren’t black, one might suspect her of racism; as it
is, one suspects her merely of not having the foggiest notion about how to play
a classical role.
Perdita, a radiant Proserpine figure,
in whom beauty and natural nobility combine into a symbol of the mercies of
Providence, requires an actress of salient loveliness and charismatic
grace. Sixty years ago, E.M.W. Tillyard
complained that “the part . . . is usually taken by some pretty little fool or
pert suburban charmer”; what would the eminent Shakespearean have made of
Jennifer Dundas, who, though decidedly little, foolish, and suburban, doesn’t
even manage the rest of that reprehended repertoire? As Antigonus, Graham Brown uses his
tissue-paper-over-the-comb-like voice as if he were a big, bleating flugelhorn
gone bonkers. You’d think even the bear
who devours him would find him unbearable.
MacIntyre Dixon and Tom McGowan are routine clowns, but Rocco Sisto’s
Autolycus is not an “engagingly lighthearted rogue” (Robin May’s phrase) but a
greasy, leering, and cold-blooded creep.
As two minor lords, Albert Farrar and Peter Jay Fernandez contribute
major damage; Jesse Bernstein cannot even make Mamillius moving.
Under better direction, Graham Winton
(Florizel), James Olson (though miscast as Camillo), and Michael Cumpsty (too
bad he has to camp up the role of Time) could have done respectably. Yet the greatest waste is that of Diana
Venora, a fine actress but not your ideal Hermione. She is best in tough, outspoken, witty—even
abrasive—roles, and has the perky face and streetwise voice to go with
them. As (sometimes literally) the
picture of pure, abused womanhood, she would need more directorial help than
she gets here. Lapine even cuts her
crucial last speech. Rob Besserer moves
and dances sinuously as Harlequin, but remains an interloping busybody.
John Arnone is a clever set designer
and his present décor would do handily for some other play—although the
Bohemian scenes work well enough in this one, too. His Sicilia, alas, lacks austere grandeur. Beverly Emmons provides her usual exaggerated
lighting effects, and Franne Lee, who specializes in rags and motley, offers
mostly that by way of costumes—perhaps appropriately, given that onstage-trunk
provenance. Still, it would be nice if
the prince’s and the rogue’s costumes were sufficiently different to alter the
wearers’ status when they exchange them, and if the actors were remotely the
same size.
In the end, I think I figured out why
Lapine imposed that inapposite Reni painting, Nessus and Deianeira, on us.
His entire concept is a Nessus’ shirt, torturing the play to death. Lapine’s Winter’s
Tale is a tale, all right, albeit not one told to Hermione by her son. Rather, it’s a tale told by an idiot, with
unsound sound and puffs of misplaced fury.
Lapine has said, “I’m drawn to dreams. . . . They’re ineffable.” I think he is raptly contemplating (to quote
Eliot) “his ineffable, effable/Effanineffable” inscrutable dreams.
[McFadden characterized Simon’s prose
style as writing that “danced with literary allusions and arch rhetoric”—I’d have
said he was infected with the William F. Buckley Syndrome—the compulsion deliberately
to choose a $50 word or an arcane reference when a $5 word or accessible allusion
is available, just to show off. You can
see what Simon’s obituary writer meant.
[I’ll try to interpret some of the
more obvious references in Simon’s Winter’s Tale notice—but I won’t catch all of them.
Guido Reni (1575 -1642) – an Italian painter of the Baroque period; he
painted religious, mythological, and allegorical subjects, one of which is The
Abduction of Deianeira (1617-21), also
known as Nessus and Deianeira. The painting illustrates the mythical story (told
in Sophocles’ play Women of
Trachis) of the centaur Nessus on whose back Deianeira, the beautiful wife
of Heracles, rode across the river Euenos.
Nessus decided to abduct and rape Deianeira, but Heracles, on the bank of the
river, heard Deianeira’s cries and shot Nessus with a poisoned arrow. In revenge, Nessus told Deianeira that his
blood was a charm to ensure that Heracles would be true to her forever and she
believed him even though it was commonly known that a centaur’s blood was
poisonous. Deianeira collected Nessus’
blood, and one day, afraid that Heracles had taken a lover, she gave him a tunic
soaked in Nessus’ blood. When Heracles
put the tunic on, the poison cooked him alive, and to escape the unbearable
pain, he built a funeral pyre and threw himself on it. Simon alludes to this myth at the end of his
review.
Longhi
– I’m not sure if Simon’s referring to Alessandro Longhi (1733–1813) or Pietro
Longhi (1701–1785 or 1702–1785), both Italian painters of the period. I suspect he means Pietro Longhi, who was the
more prominent artist and who’s more likely, as a genre painter, to have
painted actors or stage characters such as Arlecchino (the Italian name for the
commedia character
Harlequin).
Street Scene
– a 1929 play by Elmer Rice (1892-1967) that’s set on the front stoop of a New
York City brownstone and in the adjacent street.
his
Evita laurels
– Patinkin appeared as Che Guevarra in Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s Evita in its Broadway première. The play opened at the Broadway Theatre on 25 September
1979. As for the other references to
Patinkin, he is Jewish, which is what makes the reference below so hurtful, but
he’s actually from Chicago, not New York City.
Der Stürmer – as Simon writes, a notorious Nazi
periodical published in Germany from 1923 to the end of the Third Reich. A weekly tabloid newspaper, it was vehemently
anti-Semitic and was famous for its insulting and degrading cartoons of Jewish
people.
Marat getting
ready for Charlotte Corday
– Jean-Paul Marat (1743-93) was a French revolutionary who, because he suffered
from a skin condition, only found relief by soaking in a medicinal
bath. He was assassinated in his bath by
Charlotte Corday (1768-93) on 3 July 1793. I
assume Simon is also making reference to the 1963 play The
Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of
the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade (usually just called Marat/Sade) by German playwright Peter Weiss (1916-82),
which tells this story. The Royal
Shakespeare Company did a landmark production of the English translation on
Broadway in 1965-66.
Christopher
Reeve
– The actor, born in 1952, was paralyzed by an horseback-riding accident in
1995, just six years after this performance; he died in 2004. He was, indeed, an Ivy Leaguer—he attended
Cornell University—but had no connection to Skull and Bones, which is a secret
society at Yale University. He was an
experienced stage actor long before he was cast as Superman in 1978.
Alfre Woodard – The references to Topsy and
Butterfly McQueen are particularly egregious.
Topsy is a character in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s
Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a young slave girl, and
has become a racial stereotype of the “pickaninny.” Butterfly McQueen (1911-95) was an
African-American actress who famously played maids to wealthy white women, such
as Prissy, Scarlett O'Hara's maid, in the 1939 film Gone with the Wind. In that
part, McQueen spoke in a high-pitched, squeaky voice and always seemed
flustered or frightened. Simon may not
have felt Woodard had any idea how to perform a classical role, but the Actors’
Equity Association felt differently: AEA awarded her the 1989 Joe A. Callaway
Award for her performance in The Winter’s Tale. (The Callaway Award is given
to an actor, selected by a panel of critics, for the best performance in a
classical play in the New York metropolitan area.)
E. M. W. Tillyard (1889-1962) – an English classical
and literary scholar.
Robin May – I’m sorry, but Simon’s got me here;
I have no idea who this is. (Possibly Robin
May, 1929-96, an actor who became a writer and journalist specializing in
theater, opera, and the American west.)
“his
ineffable, effable/Effanineffable” – as you might guess, a quotation from T. S. Eliot’s (1888-1965)
Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats (1939), which was later transformed into the 1981 musical Cats by Andrew Lloyd Webber (b. 1948). The passage is from the poem “The Naming of
Cats,” the last lines of which read:
When you notice a cat in profound
meditation,
The reason, I tell you, is always the same:
His mind is engaged in a rapt
contemplation
Of the thought, of the thought, of the thought of his name:
His ineffable effable
Effanineffable
Deep and inscrutable singular Name.
[As for the rest, you’re on your own I’m afraid. Just like Simon’s readers in 1989!]
* *
* *
“WINTER PLEASURES, SUMMER DOLDRUMS”
“WINTER PLEASURES, SUMMER DOLDRUMS”
Rick
3 April 1989
[This is my own review of Winter’s
Tale from page 25 of the New York
Native of 3 April 1989. The column covered two plays; “Summer
Doldrums” refers to the second presentation, Adjoining Traces by Randy Buck at the 45th Street Theatre in
the Theatre District. (It’s a play about
the summer of 1946, when Tennessee Williams and Carson McCullers shared a house
on Nantucket while he worked on the script of Summer and Smoke and she adapted her novel The Member of the Wedding into a stage play. I have deleted that half of the column
because it’s not relevant to this post.)]
James Lapine’s production of The
Winter’s Tale is the best Shakespeare I’ve seen in a very long time. Running three hours plus intermission, the
performance is so engaging it seems shorter than some recent one-act offerings
I’ve sat through.
Lapine, best known as Stephen
Sondheim’s collaborator and director for Sunday in the Park With George
and Into the Woods, mounts the story with energy and honesty. Despite the famous problems with Winter’s
Tale, stumbling blocks for literary scholars, Lapine puts on stage a piece
of theater that moves its audience alternately to tears and laughter. Even given the improbable plot, it is
impossible not to be caught up in it.
There were quite a few damp eyes among the audience during the final
scene, an astounding response to Shakespeare.
There are no startling directorial
tricks or innovations here. Lapine’s
production is straightforward and simple, calling for essentially realistic
acting from his cast. His most
noticeable adjustments are to clothe his company, according to the program, in
late-eighteenth-century dress (though it looks early nineteenth) and to start
the play with the scene, repeated later in its proper place, in which Hermione
coaxes Mamillius to “sit by us, And tell’s a tale.” The costumes, by Franne Lee, give an
attractive look to the production, but have little other effect. The new prologue, however, ends with the
appearance of Harlequin (Rob Besserer) who passes out costume bits—sashes,
robes, a bear’s head—from a trunk, resolving some of the play’s bumpiness by
setting it up as a child’s story (“a sad tale’s best for winter”). Harlequin’s reappearance at the end of the
first act and briefly, behind a scrim, at the end of Act Two, reminds us that
we’ve been watching a story.
The device is nice, but what really
makes this such a good production is the acting. Lapine’s cast, drawn essentially from the
Joseph Papp Repertory Company, is solid to the last character, creating one of
the most even ensembles I have seen on a NYSF stage. Even fifth-grader Jesse Bernstein (Mamillius)
works simply, engaged in each moment even when he is not the focus. Other standouts in the company are Mandy
Patinkin, who makes the difficult role of Leontes, even his mercurial shift
from paranoid jealousy to abject penitence, credible and sympathetic; Diane
Venora, whose sweet Hermione draws tears from spectators’ eyes; Alfre Woodard,
a powerful and stalwart Paulina; and Rocco Sisto, whose Autolycus, a delightful
singing rogue, cannot help picking a pocket or lifting a broach at any
opportunity. Other members of the strong
cast, including Christopher Reeve (Polixenes), James Olson (Camillo), Tom
McGowan (Clown), Graham Winton (Florizel) and Jennifer Dundas (Perdita),
provide frequent pleasure, too.
* *
* *
“PAPP DEMANDS
SIMON’S FIRING”
“Broadway Beat”
by Dana Maychick
by Dana Maychick
New York Post
30 March 1989
[Readers of
Rick
On Theater may notice a slight disconnect
in this article (and several following ones): its publication date precedes the
date on the cover of both Simon’s New York review and my own in the Native. How can there be a response to the review
before it’s on the newsstands? Well,
it’s actually simple to explain—though not to justify: both New York and the New York Native dated their issues ahead of the calendar—so
issues with a cover date of Monday, 3 April, were actually published on Monday,
27 March. I know, it doesn’t really make
sense—but that’s the fac’, Jack. Live
with it!]
Claiming flourishes of “racism and
anti-Semitism,” New York Shakespeare Festival producer Joseph Papp has called
for the firing of New York magazine’s theater critic John Simon over his review
of Papp’s latest offering, “The Winter’s Tale.”
Yesterday, New York magazine Editor
and Publisher Ed Kosner refused—through his assistant—to comment.
“What Simon says is an insult to
blacks and Jews and all fair-minded people.” Papp said yesterday. “It goes beyond cruelty, Simon’s favorite
weapon, directly to bigotry. And it’s a
reason for the magazine to fire him.”
In his scathing review of “The
Winter’s Tale” in the April 3 issue of New York—the most negative among
predominantly positive notoces—Simon compared black actress Alfre Woodard to
several black caricatures of blacks [sic],
including the pickaninny character Topsy from “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” and
Butterfly McQueen, the actress best known for her portrayal of Scarlett
O’Hara’s squeaky-voiced slave Prissy in “Gone With the Wind.”
The National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) has asked that Simon be severely
chastised. “It’s beyond my comprehension
that this kind of stuff is still going on,” said spokesperson Hazel Dukes.
Simon also wrote that actor Mandy Patinkin
looks “rather like a caricature in the notorious Nazi publication Der
Stuermer,” Julius Streicher’s Jew-baiting, Nazi newspaper which often depicted
Jews as grotesque, misshapen human beings.
A spokesperson for the Anti-Defamation
League of the B’nai B’rith said he will review the matter with the officers of
the organization.
Papp went on to characterize Simon as “perverted. He hates to see ethnicity. He hates to look at black people, anybody
who’s different. His philosophy is close
to Nazism: it’s as if physical purity is all he looks for. I’m really disgusted by this.["]
“Mandy has this wonderful, open face,”
Papp continued. “It’s a Jewish face, yes, a Semitic
face. What’s wrong with that? Look at Simon himself. He’s hardly the ideal Aryan. He may not be Aryan at all. He may be a denying, self-hating Jew. And he should look in the mirror. He looks like the picture of Dorian Gray two
years after the deterioration. And it’s
funny, because he’s always dating these 16- and 17-year-olds.”
The mud-slinging continued when Simon
was asked to comment. The critic called
the producer a “madman” and “a total wash-out. He says I should be fired?
Ha! He’s a great impresario but
he should stick to that. When it comes
to taste, he has none. That productions
of Shakespeare in this country should largely rely on what he gives us is a
travesty.”
Our phone conversation was interrupted
when Simon had to take a call from his magazine. He called back and agreed to explain his
review.
“What I was saying, in essence, is
that Patinkin is too ethnic to play the role of Leontes. You can’t play the king of a Greek or Roman
kingdom if you look too ethnic.” As for
Alfre Woodard, “she’s a terrible actress,” Simon said. “And blacks do not belong in parts for white actresses,
unless they can pass for white. That’s
wrong—historically and sociologically and logically.”
When asked if he were, in fact, Jewish
himself, Simon said, “I’m not. No,
no. But I don’t want that discussed. My Yugoslavian-ness should have nothing to do
with it.” He called Papp’s comments
about the choice of his dates “ludicrous.
Furthermore, it’s not true. The
fact is that the woman I’ve lived with for the last two years is 38.”
[Simon was born in Yugoslavia (when it
was known as the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes) of Hungarian descent in
1925. He came to the United States at 16
in 1941. At the time of the above
article, Simon was about six weeks shy of 64 years old.]
* *
* *
“MORNING
REPORT”
by Aleen McMinn
”Calendar”
Los Angeles Times
3 April 1989
[The story of John Simon’s review of Winter’s
Tale and its consequences was picked up
across the country, including the West Coast.
Here’s a report from Los Angeles, followed by one from San Francisco.]
STAGE
A top New York drama critic has
received harsh notices after suggesting that actors in a new production of
Shakespeare’s “Winter’s Tale” are too Jewish and too black for the bard. Colleen Dewhurst, Actors Equity president, and
the play’s producer, Joseph Papp, have both demanded that New York magazine
critic John Simon be fired for his remarks.
In his review of the play, which stars Christopher Reeve, Simon said
that actor Mandy Patinkin looked like a cartoon Jew and that actress Alfre
Woodard resembled Topsy, a character in the novel “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” The National Assn. for the Advancement of
Colored People (NAACP) has asked Simon to apologize to Woodard and to every
black actor in America for the review, which it described as “dripping with
racism.” Simon, whose reviews have often
provoked controversy, insists Shakespearean roles not written specifically for
blacks should not be performed by them.
* *
* *
“JOHN SIMON
REVIEW IS CALLED ‘RACIST’”
“Personals”
by Leah Garchik
San Francisco Chronicle
4 April 1989
New York magazine’s John Simon, the
Ivan the Terrible of drama critics, said that one star looked too Jewish and
another too black in Joseph Papp’s production of Shakespeare’s “The Winter’s
Tale.”
Simon said that Mandy Patinkin looks
like a caricature from the Nazi publication “Der Sturmer,” and co-star Alfre
Woodard looks like Topsy in “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”
Colleen Dewhurst, president of Actors
Equity, called Simon “a dangerous man and said he should be fired, a view
shared by Papp. Simon fired back, saying
that Dewhurst was angry because he had “on occasion” given her “less that
adoring reviews. I’m afraid actors are
not generally known for their intellect.”
The New York branch of the NAACP said
the review was “dripping with racism” and asked the critic to apologize.
Ed Kosner, editor of New York
magazine, defended the writer and said that Simon has had a history of
differences of opinion with Papp.
[There's more to come. I hope you'll return to ROT for the rest of this series on the late theater reviewer, John Simon. Part 2 will be posted on Sunday, 1 December.]
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