Once in a Lifetime

Once in a Lifetime (1930), a comedy by Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman. [ Music Box Theatre, 406 perf.] The fading of vaudeville and the coming of sound films create turmoil in the entertainment industry. The two‐a‐day team of Jerry Hyland (Grant Mills), May Daniels (Jean Dixon), and George Lewis (Hugh O'Connell) find themselves out of work, so they head west to give elocution lessons to the terrified actors at the Glogauer film studio. Once in Hollywood they discover uniformed pages circulating with signs announcing Mr.Glogauer's whereabouts and roomfuls of dejected playwrights who have been brought to Hollywood en masse, and who now seem likely to have nervous breakdowns from underwork. The thickheaded George is made a film director. He shoots the wrong script, forgets to order the lights turned on, and audibly cracks nuts during the shooting. But the film is hailed as a masterpiece and George as a genius, so he is made Glogauer's second‐in‐command. In this first of the great Hart‐Kaufman collaborations, Kaufman himself assumed the role of a depressed, articulate playwright. Although Merton of the Movies had earlier used a similar story to spoof Hollywood, it was this play that initiated a rash of satires on the film industry. A successful 1979 revival at the Circle in the Square featured John Lithgow, Treat Williams, and Deborah May.

George S. Kaufman Moss Hart 1930

Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman’s Once in a Lifetime was one of the pair’s best collaborations, the first of eight they wrote together in the 1930s. Inspired by the rise of the talkies — movies with sound — and the excess of Hollywood, the play is a wisecracking satire, though not particularly mean or bitter. Hart had originally written the play in 1929. Kaufman, a more established comic playwright, collaborated with Hart on several rewrites in late 1929 and early 1930. After several problematic out-of-town tryouts, Once in a Lifetime opened on September 24, 1930, at the Music Box in New York City. It ran for 406 performances and won the Roi Cooper Megrue Prize for comedy in 1930. The play was very popular with both critics and audiences, giving them something to think about other than the growing economic depression. Since its original production, Once in a Lifetime was revived regularly through years, both on and off Broadway, as well as regionally and in Europe. Subsequent critics saw the play as a product of its time, but many believed its humor stood up well. The excesses of Hollywood were still contemporary, though some of the plays’ references were dated. As the New York Times’ Howard Taubman wrote in a 1962 review “Once in a Lifetime is still pertinent and funny. The film industry has been through more upheavals than an old-time banana republic, but the more it changes the more some of its foibles remain the same.”