Donald Trump’s One-Show Career As a Broadway Producer

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“If my play had been a big hit, I guess he wouldn’t be president.” sarahw reports on Donald Trump's one-show career as a Broadway producer

Sam Levene and Molly Picon in Paris Is Out! Photo-Illustration: Vulture and Friedman-Abeles© The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts Paris Is Out!, a slight Broadway comedy starring Molly Picon and Sam Levene, opened at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre on February 4, 1970. But opened is not quite the right term: The play’s producer, David Black, had hit on a novel idea, one that gave the playwright, Richard Seff, some misgivings: There would be no traditional opening night.

The play’s conflict, typical of a domestic comedy of that era, is on the gentle side. Hortense and Daniel bicker about vacation plans. Hortense dreams of Europe. Daniel won’t go to Venice , and Paris is, as the title says, definitely out. Their son and daughter have problems of their own. Charlotte is recently widowed with a teenage son. Their son, Roger, is ending marriage No. 2, adamant that he won’t be charmed into wedlock a third time.

Then there was the matter of the cast. Jack Somack, who played Daniel in Paramus, wasn’t star enough to match Picon’s wattage, and Sam Levene was suddenly available for the role when Three Men on a Horse didn’t transfer. Black also decided that Roger and Arlene needed to be recast. Terry Kiser — later known as the corpse in Weekend at Bernie’s — and Zina Jasper had the theatrical chops that Black and his director, Paul Aaron, wanted.

“He had done his homework, and that was unusual,” Black said. “Most of the people who put up money for shows just wanted to meet girls and go to parties, but he wasn’t like that.” By the end of the lunch, Trump made his offer, one that sounds characteristic of him: He’d pay half the cost of putting up Paris Is Out! so long as he got equal billing on the posters and in Playbill. Black remembered Trump’s investment as 70 grand; Seff thinks it was lower, closer to $50,000.

An ad for the show that appeared in the Daily News. Glover’s criticism paled next to the judgment of the New York Times’ Clive Barnes. He called the play “as harmless as it is pointless,” its scenarios “pitiable,” the acting forgettable. Half a century later, Seff could still quote it to me, and huffed that “[Barnes] was a plump English gentleman who had been a critic for about 15 minutes … he came from British ballet, with no idea what an American family looked like.

 

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