On April 17, 2014: Moss Hart Bio-Play, Act One, Opens on Broadway

Today in 2014, a stage play adaptation of playwright-director Moss Hart's 1959 autobiography Act One opened on Broadway at Lincoln Center Theater's Vivian Beaumont Theater, kicking off a run of 67 performances and 31 previews. The production was also filmed live and shown on PBS' Live From Lincoln Center series.

The book and play track Hart's life, from a humble upbringing in The Bronx to his fateful meeting with playwright George S. Kaufman and eventual success as a Broadway writer. The two ultimately became the rare book-writing duo, jointly writing the Pulitzer-winning You Can't Take It With You, Once In a Lifetime, I'd Rather Be Right, The Fabulous Invalid, The Man Who Came to Dinner, and Merrily We Roll Along (which would go on to become the source material of the Stephen Sondheim-George Furth musical of the same name). Though Act One concludes with the opening of Kaufman and Hart's first successful Broadway collaboration in 1930, Hart would go on to solely write the book to the 1941 Kurt Weill-Ira Gershwin musical Lady in the Dark, and also enjoyed a long career as a director, helming the original productions of My Fair Lady and Camelot, among other titles.

Lapine, who also directed the original staging, adapted the book by having the same actor narrate as an older Hart while also playing Kaufman within the story, a role created by Tony Shalhoub for the Broadway premiere. The original cast also included Santino Fontana as Hart, Chuck Cooper as Charles Gilpin, Andrea Martin as Aunt Kate, and Will Brill as David Allen, along with Bob Ari, Bill Army, Laurel Casillo, Steven Kaplan, Will LeBow, Mimi Lieber, Charlotte Maier, Noah Marlowe, Greg McFadden, Deborah Offner, Lance Roberts, Matthew Saldivar, Matthew Schechter, Jonathan Spivey, Wendy Rich Stetson, Bob Stillman, and Amy Warren.

The show got five 2014 Tony Award nominations, including for Best Play. It won a prize for Beowulf Boritt's scenic design, a complex and elaborate multi-level setup that was able to quickly shift from location to location using a rotating stage in the cavernous Beaumont.

Much like the book that was its source material, Act One is a play that anyone who loves the theatre would be delighted by. As Ben Brantley put it reviewing the original production for The New York Times, "...whatever its flaws, Act One ... brims contagiously with the ineffable, irrational, and irrefutable passion for that endangered religion called the Theatre."

Look back on the original production of Act One in the gallery below.