• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 695 0

of Kanin, who had directed a Krasna-written movie, Bachelor Mother, for RKO in 1939 but was, more importantly, Cukor’s magical collaborator on the classics Adam’s Rib and Pat and Mike. Having cut his teeth on RKO comedies, Kanin had, by his account, “fine-tuned a revolutionary comedy directing style” of his own. “I knew what worked and what didn’t by trial and error over thirty years with some of the greatest light comedians and writers America has ever known.” Admiring as he was of Krasna, however, something about Sunday in New York sat uneasily with Kanin. Perhaps, as the actress Sondra Lee, cast in a prominent role, observed, it was the “acrobatic, in-your-face sexuality of a plot on the brink of the Swingin’ Sixties”—a will-she-or-won’t-she-yield-her-virginity romp that bordered on the pornographic compared with Tracy-Hepburn—that stalled Kanin. Or perhaps, as Redford believed, it was the fault of the writing. The story line, to be sure, was familiar. Eileen Taylor, an ingénue from Albany, visits her airline pilot brother in his New York apartment, argues the principles of modern morality, goes out to see a movie, meets Mike Mitchell, a part-time art critic on the make, catches her brooch on his suit, agrees to meet for tea at Longchamps restaurant to discuss the $2 repair and, over the next six comedic scenes, falls for him. They end up gamboling in bed, “laughing hysterically,” says the script, “which is an ideal way to begin a marriage.” Redford liked the jokes, but “let’s face it, this was not up to the standard of a Kanin-Gordon script.”

Whatever its weaknesses, the play was transformed, said Kanin, by Redford’s arrival. “I didn’t intend to cast him in a lead role. We already had a major New York actor signed and sealed and in the wings. But then Bob came in to read for a lesser part, and I thought immediately that he looked like Spencer Tracy. He did his small piece and Merrick and I thanked him, but he said, very politely, that he would like to read for the lead. We were a little shocked, but we said go ahead. There was nothing to lose. He walked into the wings and reappeared in a few moments, in the same clothes, and proceeded to give a subtle, funny, original performance as Mike Mitchell, the main character. He was canny. He’d been holding back on the first reading, which wasn’t terrific, because he believed he was the lead, and he was correct.”

Redford stressed the edginess in Sunday in New York and, according to Kanin, brought the trendy sexuality to the fore. “We jumped forward with Bob, and that was his contribution, not ours.” David Merrick avoided rehearsals, leaving Kanin in uncontested control. Kanin duly attacked Krasna’s script, replacing pedestrian lines with his own witticisms. For Sondra Lee, the rehearsals took fire when Redford and Pat Stanley, playing the virginal Eileen, “hit their stride within two days.” The entire play was dependent, says Lee, on sparks from that romantic chemistry. “And Bob and Pat delivered, big-time. They flirted. It was powerful. They were smooth as silk, and they made something from nothing very much.”

The play opened at the Cort on Broadway on November 29 to mixed reviews, but the critics had only good things to say about Redford. Walter Kerr of the New York Herald Tribune said Redford “is really first-rate no matter what the evening is doing.” And Richard Coe of The Washington Post deemed him “a marvelously skilled farceur.” Redford was pleased. “But I knew it was a hairsbreadth success,” he says. “And the truth was that just one review turned it around for all of us.” Howard Taubman in The New York Times commended a play that “is inventive and chic [and] sparkles with freshness and humor.” That review alone, says Redford, secured the play’s survival and his first significant stage success.

Christmas of 1961 was heightened by Lola’s new pregnancy, steady income and, for the first time, late-night appreciative crowds at the stage door. Redford felt validated, and Sondra Lee remembers him blissfully happy, even crossing Manhattan on foot in a snowstorm to deliver