You know…I think Arsenic and Old Lace might have had an outsized influence on my life.
I saw it for the first time, I think, on stage at my high school, the very first semester of my freshman year. I distinctly remember falling out of my chair I was laughing so hard. And I think it convinced me to do theater that very next semester. I wish I could remember the teacher’s name. She stopped doing the theater program the next year, but I got her that second semester for an intro class. I got seriously into theater immediately after, and it’s what I ended up studying in college, moving down to LA for, and what got me into “the business.”
One of our god-kids Mira did Arsenic tonight at her high school. We went to go see her. She was amazing, of course, and it put me right back in that theater seat thirty-ish years ago.
Guys…the play is bonkers. Like SO bonkers. Unhinged, even. It’s wild it was a broadway show, and a big one at that. Ran for three years. The movie was a huge hit, too—Cary Grant. Boris Karloff. Peter Lorre. I think I went and saw the movie after the play, but it might have been the other way around. Whichever way it was, I definitely remember going to see the play at my high school, and distinctly remember thinking, ‘holy crap, I want to do THAT.’ I remember the audience being decently sized, too, which was no small feat in our high school theater. That auditorium was MASSIVE. Balcony and everything. Man, you could probably fit…1,000 people in there? Something like that? They’d fill it, too, for all-school assemblies. I wonder what shape that theater is in these days. I’d be interested to go back and find out. The stage even opened up into an orchestra pit if you wanted it to, though we never did.
That was where it started. It all came back to me tonight. Arsenic and Old Lace.
Wild.