Neil Simon

Second Stage Director Richard Blomquist does his best with the theater's temporary space in mounting his production of Neil Simon's "Chapter Two," but the Community Center at Woods is better suited to a lively workout than to live theater.President Mary James is searching for a permanent home for Second Stage, formerly the St. Martin's Players, but theater space is in short supply.Blomquist is coping by using a minimal set consisting of a sofa at each end of the area with coffee tables, end tables and phone props.

The deck may have been reshuffled at WLIF-FM (101.9), but management promises the game is remaining the same.Dick Ireland and Gary Hamilton, the station's morning and afternoon deejays, respectively, were both fired last week. Rumors have been circulating that this is only the first move in a major format change, but that's not the case at all, insists program director Gary Balaban."What has occurred are the changes," says Balaban, promising the music will remain as is. "The station has evolved over a long period of time from being a beautiful-music station to an adult contemporary station, and we felt that this was the time we needed to make a change in mornings and afternoons."

It's not as raucous as "The Odd Couple"; not as dark as "Lost in Yonkers." "Proposals," now playing a pre-Broadway run at Washington's Kennedy Center, is Neil Simon in a poignant vein.The poignancy is apparent from the opening strains of Stephen Flaherty's incidental music to the first sight of John Lee Beatty's wooded set, lighted by Brian MacDevitt to suggest dusky twilight in the Poconos.Most of all, this poignancy is revealed in the entrance of actress L. Scott Caldwell as the play's wise narrator, Clemma Diggins, who lets us know -- not unlike Tennessee Williams' alter ego in "The Glass Menagerie" -- that "Proposals" is a memory play.

Neil Simon has done it in New York and California, so why not try it abroad?"It" is a series of one-act plays set in a hotel, and in this latest incarnation, the hotel is London's Connaught. "London Suite," which was Simon's first-ever off-Broadway premiere, will have its Baltimore premiere at the Spotlighters Theatre beginning tomorrow, under Bob Russell's direction.The four playlets include the tale of a Welsh writer who has caught his financial adviser with his hand in the till; the comic account of a daughter playing matchmaker for her widowed mother; the heart-rending reunion of an actress and her bisexual ex-husband; and the farcical shenanigans that result when an American couple planning to attend Wimbledon discovers the husband has lost the tickets.

You might think that, after 30 plays, this writing business would get easier -- that there wouldn't be as many rewrites, that Neil Simon would get it right the first time.But play No. 30, "Proposals," which opens a pre-Broadway run at Washington's Kennedy Center today, had eight full rewrites before it went into rehearsals, and the changes keep on coming."I put one in just the other day," Simon says, referring to a rewrite he did on the plane home from the show's stop in New Haven. "I put in a new ending to a scene -- one last thing I wasn't very happy with.

An article in yesterday's edition of The Sun in Anne Arundel incorrectly stated the plot of "Rumors," the Neil Simon play in production at Colonial Players on East Street in Annapolis.In the play, the deputy mayor of New York shoots himself in the ear.The Sun regrets the error.As one of America's most successful and prolific playwrights, Neil Simon has given us enduring characters in believable situations. But likable characters need not apply for "Rumors," a Neil Simon farce that ridicules the self-absorbed.

For the first time in 21 years, the Carroll Players won't open its fall production at Frock's Sunnybrook Farm on Bond Street in Westminster. The community theater group, which faced an uncertain future when the popular catering hall closed in the spring, has found a new home across town at Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 467."They've been really wonderful to us and very good to work with," said Marcia Bogash, director of the fall production. "We've come in and put up lighting grids and blinds at the windows and have taken over the upstairs.

Take one dead deputy mayor of New York, mix in two lawyers, an accountant, another politician, a psychiatrist and a television cook and you have the recipe for Neil Simon's farce, "Rumors," which opens Saturday at Colonial Players on East Street in Annapolis.Simon has been shrewdly observing and portraying the middle class with wisdom and wit since 1961 in a string of hits that includes "Come Blow Your Horn," "Barefoot in the Park," "The Odd Couple," "Biloxi Blues," "The Goodbye Girl" and "Brighton Beach Memoirs."

Broadway may have bid a swift goodbye to "The Goodbye Girl" -- the 1993 musical Neil Simon adapted from his 1977 movie -- but Cockpit in Court is granting it an enthusiastic welcome.Maybe the show's structure, with its perky songs (by Marvin Hamlisch and David Zippel) interspersed between bits of narrative, was too much of a throwback for brash Broadway. Maybe the plot -- an "Odd Couple" story about reluctant roommates who fall in love -- was too sentimental. Maybe the lack of special effects -- not a helicopter or crashing chandelier in sight -- was too austere.

WASHINGTON -- Neil Simon is sitting in the lounge at the Four Seasons Hotel, nursing his sore throat with a cup of chamomile tea. At 69, after 29 plays and 20-odd screenplays, he is touring again.But this time he's not touring with a show. This time, he is the show. From Toronto to Pittsburgh, from New York to the Washington's Smithsonian, hundreds of people are filling auditoriums to see Neil Simon instead of a Neil Simon play.That's the difference between writing a play and writing a memoir, "Rewrites," Simon's first "real" book.

A gem of a theater can be found only one mile over the Anne Arundel-Prince George's line at Bowie Playhouse in Whitemarsh Park, which reopened last December after undergoing a half-million-dollar renovation. Bowie Playhouse is home to three groups that alternate shows: Prince George's Little Theatre, Bowie Community Theatre and 2nd Star Productions, which opened its season last weekend with Neil Simon's "The Dinner Party." Despite a distinguished 13-year history that includes winning three Ruby Griffith Awards presented by the British Embassy, for "Guys and Dolls" in 2002, "Mame" in 2004 and "Man of La Mancha" in 2009, 2nd Star has struggled to survive the recession and only gained enough support in June to mount its 14th season.

Prince George's Little Theatre Company is offering up for holiday cheer some golden age television comedy with the production of Neil Simon's Laughter on the 23rd Floor, opening tomorrow and running this weekend and next. This is PGLT's first production in the newly refurbished Bowie Playhouse in Whitemarsh Park. First on Broadway in 1993, Simon's semi-autobiographical comedy takes a nostalgic look at 1953 when Simon was one of the team of top comedy writers that included Mel Brooks, Woody Allen and Carl Reiner who wrote for Sid Caesar's weekly 90-minute Your Show of Shows.

Before Monday's rehearsal of Bowie Community Theatre's coming production of Neil Simon's Proposals, director Jerry Gietka mentioned the problem of adding humor to America's wittiest, most successful playwright. Gietka felt the need to bring in two "Mutt and Jeff-type bodyguards" to beef up the comedy whose laughs come mostly from a malaprop-prone Mafioso character. "This is a very difficult script to bring off. It's not a typical Neil Simon play," Gietka said. "This play moves more on the ebb and flow of the dialogue and the changes in mood brought about by changes in feelings among the various relationships.

The Bay Theatre folks know how to throw a great party to announce their coming season and celebrate their past ones. Describing the next year as "a dream of a season," Bay Theatre co-founder and artistic director Lucinda Merry-Browne recently announced the 2005-2006 season - the company's fourth - to a capacity audience seated in the theater. The three-play season opens in October with Sam Shepherd's Fool for Love - a tale of cowboy Eddie's forbidden love for May, who loves and hates him, and is tired of being used.

YOU CAN LEAD the culture-starved masses to the revived Hippodrome Theatre, but once you get them there you had better have something for them to nosh on. With that in mind, I ate lunch last week at the newly opened Hipp Cafe, a handsome, hustling, quick-bite kind of place that cozies up to the theater lobby. Sitting under spotlights and surrounded by black-and-white photos of the stars of stage and screen, I got a buzz on. The charge didn't come from my beverage - a glass of club soda - but from the room.

The Prisoner of Second Avenue - Neil Simon's 1971 urban-angst comedy about the troubles besetting an out-of-work New York businessman - opens tomorrow at the Vagabond Players. Under Mike Moran's direction, Tony Colavito stars as the beleaguered protagonist, and Joan Crooks plays his wife. Donna DeVilbiss, Barb Gehring, Christine Lagana and Richard W. Moore round out the cast. Show times at the Vagabonds, 806 S. Broadway, are 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 2 p.m. Sundays and 7 p.m. March 30. The play runs through April 6. Tickets are $12. Call 410-563-9135.

Friday, 2nd Star opened its fall season with Neil Simon's 1995 play London Suite, a collection of four half-hour comic plays, which continue through Sept. 21 at Bowie Playhouse in Whitemarsh Park. One of America's most successful playwrights has found a winning formula in his quartets of one-act plays filled with four groups of characters involved in different situations, connected only by having stayed in the same hotel suite, a device he used in Plaza Suite and California Suite. In 2nd Star's production of London Suite, director Charles Maloney has assembled a cast that largely succeeds in delivering all the laughs of Simon's comedy, although some performances were a bit uneven on opening night.

Job may have suffered far more than his share of pain and loss in the Bible's most eloquent ode to patience and unshakable faith, but he's certainly not suffering from neglect. The Mitchell Gallery on the campus of St. John's College is showing about 50 works of art inspired by his story in a fascinating exhibit called The Sweet Uses of Adversity: Images of the Biblical Job. And a few short blocks away, at the Colonial Players' Theater off State Circle in Annapolis, the Capital City's premier theatrical ensemble is offering God's Favorite, playwright Neil Simon's humorous take on the Job story.

Showtime is promoting "Laughter on the 23rd Floor" by saying, "You can't get a ticket to see Nathan Lane on Broadway, but you can see him on Showtime." The Broadway reference is to Lane's starring role in Mel Brooks' "The Producers," the hottest ticket in the theater world these days. But that's not the only reason to focus the promotion on Lane; his performance in "Laughter on the 23rd Floor" is spectacular. Even if you don't know anything about comedian Sid Caesar and his seminal "Your Show of Shows" - the live NBC program in the early 1950s on which this made-for-cable movie is based - thanks to Lane's performance, you will still understand the man and the way in which network television almost killed him. As an added treat, Showtime is also premiering an 80-minute documentary, "Hail Sid Caesar!

Throw two motherless teen-age boys into an apartment with a loopy aunt, a gangster uncle and a vicious grandmother, stir in some great one-liners, and you have Neil Simon at his best. Winner of four Tony awards, including Best Play in 1991, and the Pulitzer Prize, "Lost in Yonkers" is ideally suited to Paragon Theatre's compact stage in Crownsville. Set in 1942 Yonkers, N.Y., the play, which continues through May 20, focuses on teen-agers Jay and Arty and their father, Eddie Kurnitz, who pays his dead wife's medical bills by taking a defense job dealing in scrap metal.