Beggar on Horseback

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Beggar on Horseback (1924), a play by George S. Kaufman and Marc Connelly. [Broadhurst Theatre, 224 perf.] Neil McRae ( Roland Young) is a talented serious composer who barely makes a living doing hack orchestrations. He is so impractical that his neighbors, Cynthia Mason ( Kay Johnson) and Dr. Albert Rice ( Richard Barbee), must look after him without seeming to do so, while Gladys Cady ( Ann Carpenter), daughter of a rich widget manufacturer from Neil's hometown, is determined to marry Neil. Mr. Cady ( George W. Barbier) encourages the match, offering to take Neil into the widget business, and promising that it will even be all right for Neil to compose popular songs on the side, so long as the songs make a million dollars. When Neil takes a sleeping pill Dr. Rice has given him, he dreams of marriage to Gladys, whose wedding bouquet is made of banknotes, and of their home where six butlers announce every caller and where he must fill out requisition forms to obtain a pencil. His new life drives Neil to murder his in‐laws. At his trial “Judge” Cady, proclaiming, “This thing of using the imagination has got to stop,” sentences Neil to work in an art factory, mass‐producing masterpieces. When he wakes from his dream, Neil decides to marry Cynthia instead of Gladys. Producer Winthrop Ames had given the authors a copy of a German play, Hans Sonnenstössers Höllenfahrt, and asked them to adapt it. For all practical purposes, the finished work was a new play, but it fell in with the vogue for Expressionism. Alexander Woollcott wrote that it represents “the distaste that can be inspired by the viewpoint, the complacency and the very idiocy of Rotarian America. It is a small and facetious disturbance in the rear of the Church of the Gospel of Success.” A lavish 1970 revival at Lincoln Center, described by John Chapman of the New York Daily News as the “most elaborate production I have ever seen at the Vivian Beaumont,” was a “gigantic, monstrous curio” that put the struggling company deeper in debt.

Beggar on Horseback, satirical play by George S. Kaufman and Marc Connelly with music by Deems Taylor. Produced and published in 1924, it was suggested by a German play, Paul Apel's Hans Sonnenstössers Höllenfahrt.