On the original opening night of “The Front Page” on August 14, 1928, there was wild applause in New York’s Times Square Theatre and one of its authors asked the famous actress Helen Hayes to marry him and she said yes.
That’s a wonderful story. It’s also true.
So is that this play, born of the adventures of two Chicago newspaper guys named Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur and a city bustling with political corruption, a remarkably influential and durable creation.
It does not have a complicated plot. Reporter Hildy Johnson is preparing to leave his newspaper, get married and move to the advertising business in New York. His editor, Walter Burns, wants him to stay and when convicted killer Earl Williams, scheduled to hang the next morning, escapes from jail, Burns wrangles Hildy into covering one more story, one final scoop. Set entirely in a dingy press room, it also features poker-playing, wisecracking reporters, a mayor worried about his re-election and a crooked sheriff.
This nearly century-old play has been chosen to open Northlight Theatre’s new, $32 million Evanston home and Northlight’s artistic director BJ Jones says, “I’m thrilled. I love this play and I think it has a great deal to say about our contemporary world. And it is so much about Chicago and I want to highlight that. I think it helps explain our era, our politics, our media. And it is so, so funny.”
Tim Evans, Northlight’s executive director, is similarly excited, saying, “It’s a big show, a momentous time for the theater. This play is so layered, still so appropriate.”
This play came to life with the aid of hugely successful producer Jed Harris and director George S. Kaufman, a genius playwright and director who helped shape comedy in the 1920s and ’30s. The names of its stars (Osgood Perkins? Lee Tracy?) are mostly forgotten. A New Republic review declared, “My God, it’s vulgar!” But in the pages of the New Yorker, the esteemed E.B. White wrote, in part, “It parades the vulgarity, the humor, the feverish vitality, the banality of modern journalism; and it is written in the idiom of the fraternity. It is unexpurgated. It is a tremendous hit.”
Tremendous, and also influential. Tennessee Williams said it was his favorite play, attributing its raw street language, profanity and frank references to previously unspoken subjects like sex and prostitution with “(taking) the corset off American drama.”
The first production ran for 278 performances. It was restaged four more times on Broadway, in 1946, 1969, 1986 and 2016, with a star-studded cast which included Nathan Lane, John Slattery and John Goodman. Tribune critic Chris Jones reviewed that production and called it still “a great Chicago play by great Chicago writers.”
The film adaptation came in 1931 with “The Front Page,” and in 1940 with “His Girl Friday,” directed by Howard Hawks and changing the Hildy character to a woman, played by Rosalind Russell, as the ex-wife of Walter Burns (Cary Grant). “The Front Page” returned to the screen in 1974, directed by Billy Wilder and starring Jack Lemmon as Hildy and Walter Matthau as Walter Burns.
It has been produced on many stages, many times, here as recently as 2011 in a well received TimeLine Theatre Company production. This new show has been “refreshed and adapted” by Jeffrey Hatcher, who also wrote the adaptation of “Dial M for Murder” at Northlight in 2023. He has followed the “Girl Friday” template in making Hildy female. Its cast of 13, which Jones has called “quite the Chicago A-list gathering,” begins previews Sept. 9.
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Gary Houston has been a fixture on the local theater scene for decades, from about the time he starred in the original production of “Grease” in 1971. He also had worked for some years at the Sun-Times. In 1981 he played McCue, a City News Bureau reporter, in the Goodman Theater production of “The Front Page.”
“I don’t know any other actor in town who enjoyed years writing and editing at a big city newspaper,” said Houston, recently nominated for a Joseph Jefferson award for his work in “The Official Biography.”
“I understudied Colin Stinton (as Walter Burns). He once said he couldn’t understand how these guys could speak in a mash-up of the gruff and the occasionally elegant. Still, he knew where the laughs lived and his timing was stellar. After one show, a woman said that she and some pals from the City News Bureau had just seen the play and she said, ‘You done us proud.’”
The newspaper business today — the digital-first emphasis, the drift toward social media, et cetera — bears little obvious resemblance to what you will see on the Northlight stage. What Hecht and MacArthur created is exquisitely of its time, but their genius was in so potently capturing a world in which headlines trump humanity, speed is valued over truth, and there is wide distrust in politics and the media.
As E.B. White wrote of the play, “The only thing the matter with it is its perfection.”
Many years ago I lived near the corner of Bowery and Houston on the lower east side of Manhattan. On more than one occasion, I would head north, invited to have drinks in the apartment of Hecht’s widow, Rose, who was a friend of my father’s.
She was a charming and chatty older woman, a former newspaper reporter, a novelist and playwright. She had worked for the Chicago Daily News, where she met Hecht, and she loved to tell stories. She told me one that I had thought was only a legend. She told me that on the long ago opening night of “The Front Page,” she and Hayes were sitting in the balcony, near “Ben and Charlie,” who were sitting on the fire escape. Once they all realized that the show was going to be a hit, Hayes jumped into MacArthur’s arms and he asked her to marry him. She said, ‘You took the words right out of my mouth.” They married three days later.