Theater
Falk's next large passion after cartooning was the theater and stage plays. During his lifetime, Falk ran five theaters, at one time or another, and he produced about 300 plays, and also directed about 100 of them. Falk wrote 12 plays, including two musicals: Happy Dollar and Mandrake the Magician, which were both based on his comic strip character. After Falk's death, his widow Elizabeth directed a musical called Mandrake the Magician and the Enchantress, which was written by Falk, and which was practically the same as his previous Mandrake the Magician musical. Some of his plays drew well-known actors and actresses such as Marlon Brando, Charlton Heston, Celeste Holm, Constance Moore, Basil Rathbone, Chico Marx, Ethel Waters, Paul Newman, Ezio Pinza, James Mason, Jack Warner, Shelley Winters, Farley Granger, Eve Arden, Alexis Smith, Victor Jory, Cedric Hardwicke, Eva Marie Saint, Eva Gabor, Sarah Churchill, James Donn, Eddie Bracken, Ann Corio, Robert Wilcox and Paul Robeson to perform in them.
The actors and actresses were all paid for their work, but many of them worked on small fractions of what they would normally earn with their movie work. Falk was proud to state that Marlon Brando had turned down an offer of $10,000 a week to act in Broadway plays, in favor of working for Falk in Boston in the play, Arms and the Man. In 1953, Brando's contract for Falk's play paid less than $500 a week.
Read more about this topic: Lee Falk
Famous quotes containing the word theater:
“We live in a time which has created the art of the absurd. It is our art. It contains happenings, Pop art, camp, a theater of the absurd.... Do we have the art because the absurd is the patina of waste...? Or are we face to face with a desperate or most rational effort from the deepest resources of the unconscious of us all to rescue civilization from the pit and plague of its bedding?”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)
“In the theater of confusion, knowing the location of the exits is what counts.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“We all know that the theater and every play that comes to Broadway have within themselves, like the human being, the seed of self-destruction and the certainty of death. The thing is to see how long the theater, the play, and the human being can last in spite of themselves.”
—James Thurber (1894–1961)