A Holocaust survivor who shared fed Broadway’s elite - and Times Square characters — at a heimish eatery so beloved it inspired a Neil Simon play.
In his heyday, Neil Simon wrote plays that tickled audiences as the height of the wisecrack genre.
Here are the seven greatest quotes from Neil Simon, who died on August 25, 2018.
Playwright Neil Simon, known for such Broadway hits as “The Odd Couple,” “Barefoot in the Park,” and “Lost in Yonkers,” has died.
Gene Saks, director of “Brighton Beach Memoirs” and countless other plays, has died at 93. Ben Ivry remembers Saks’s reputation as a creative artist and a Jewish thinker.
Although London’s hit revival of Neil Simon’s “The Sunshine Boys” starring Danny DeVito and Richard Griffiths closed on July 28, a possible fall transfer to Broadway has been announced. That’s a good excuse to shine light on a neglected Jewish vaudeville great who inspired Simon’s play.
Lucky Bruce: A Literary Memoir
Bruce Jay Friedman
Biblioasis, 275 pages $29.95
Although they aren’t nearly as dysfunctional as the narrator and the old man with the “vulture eye” in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” or Allie and Hedy in “Single White Female,” Oscar Madison and Felix Ungar make up a lousy pair of roommates in Neil Simon’s The Odd Couple.