Free Republic

I had admired Mr. Dennehy — who died on Wednesday, at 81 — as a smart, risk-taking and undersung actor onstage and onscreen. He was a heartbreakingly sensitive lout as the parvenu Lopakhin — a brute with a touch of the poet — in Peter Brook’s production of Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard” (1988) at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. His performance as the serial murderer John Wayne Gacy in the 1992 television film “To Catch a Killer” was a penetratingly human portrait of a monster, and it haunted my nightmares for a long time. But nothing I had seen Mr....

Playwright Neil Simon, a master of comedy whose laugh-filled hits such as "The Odd Couple," ''Barefoot in the Park" and his "Brighton Beach" trilogy dominated Broadway for decades, has died. He was 91. In the second half of the 20th century, Simon was the American theater's most successful and prolific playwright, often chronicling middle class issues and fears... His list of credits is staggering. The theater world quickly mourned his death, including Tony Award-winning actor and playwright Harvey Fierstein, who tweeted that Simon "could write a joke that would make you laugh, define the character, the situation, and even the...