Will Waspe
The diversifying Playboy organisation, I learn, has a number of film prospects under active consideration for investment and production. Evidently the Bunny men are not unduly discouraged by their last venture — the Polanski-Tynan Macbeth — though they will be lucky to get out with a loss of less than three quarters of a million pounds. Nevertheless I shall be surprised if there is any more Playboy dabbling in Shakespeare, nudes or no nudes.
Israel expects
Next Monday, the London Coliseum puts on a show called Gilbert and Sullivan Go Kosher in aid of the Sadler's Wells Benevolent Fund. The thought is worthy and I wish the occasion well, but the timing is unfortunate. This is a show with an appeal largely to Jewish audiences (it has been around before under the title Goldberg and Solomon) who are always under heavy pressure from their own charitable organisations and are now additionally called upon for donations in support of the Israeli war effort.
Now Is the hour
Sometimes the timing is wrong (as above), sometimes the timing
is right as, for instance, this is clearly a good monient to be setting up the production of a play about the late Marilyn Monroe, with the Mailer book lending an extra fillip to the publicity buildup, gratis. Jimmy Whiteley of Taurus Presentations is the man shrewdly doing the setting up. He has a play by David Butler called Legend in which Joan Collins will play Monroe.
Which reminds me: whatever happened to the projected London production of Arthur Miller's After the Fall, on which Tennents once held an option? (Actually, Miller has always insisted that one wasn't about MM at all, though no one believes him.)
Line out
Ah, fickle taste. It seems only yesterday that What's My Line! riveted half the nation, but the BBC's revival of the panel game seems not to have repeated the trick. The five-week run (with David Jacobs in Eamonn Andrews's old chair) is highly unlikely to be extended
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