Neil Simon’s Plaza Suite

Having conquered film and television, The Plaza entered the footlight arena on February 14, 1968, when Neil Simon’s Plaza Suite opened on Broadway. Simon was then at the peak of his popularity, with four of his shows running simultaneously on the Great White Way and two of them—The Odd Couple and Sweet Charity—being made into movies. Plaza Suite seemed a sure thing, further bolstered by a heavyweight director, Mike Nichols, and stellar cast, Maureen Stapleton and George C. Scott.

The premise of the show was simplicity itself. Performed in three acts, it chronicled three couples’ stays in the same Plaza apartment, Suite 719, with Stapleton and Scott playing the various couples. (A fourth act was cut in rehearsals and later reworked into a film, The Out-of-Towners.) An immediate hit, the comedy ran for two and a half years on Broadway, countless times on the road, and remains a repertory staple for many regional theaters to this day.

Not surprisingly, it was made into a movie starring Walter Matthau, with Maureen Stapleton, Lee Grant, and Barbara Harris as his respective foils. Although shot in part on location (with Plaza Suite 723 standing in for the fictional 719), the majority of the filming was done on a Hollywood set (seen in the publicity still here), meticulously re-created with props furnished by the hotel. The picture opened at Radio City Music Hall in June 1971, and it proved successful enough to inspire a 1987 remake for television, starring Carol Burnett. The playwright himself liked the structure of the piece well enough to write two sequels of sorts: California Suite, a movie set in the Beverly Hills Hotel, and London Suite, a play set in that city’s Connaught Hotel.

Here, the Playbill for the Broadway show picturing George C. Scott and Maureen Stapleton; here, the rather overwrought poster for the film.