‘Red Hot Patriot’ play is B’way-bound for sure if Philly gross is any hint: $437K in single-ticket sales
The Molly Ivins play—remember, Molly was the uppity newspaper columnist with a dog named Shit and a sassy ‘tude to match—is a sure thing for Broadway if you go by the numbers from Philadelphia.
Hey, brag, didn’t I think as much earlier?
From March 19 through Sunday as reported by Michael Klein in the Philadelphia Inquirer, the world première starring Kathleen Turner (left photo) “racked up $437,000 in single-ticket sales” for the Philadelphia Theater Company.
Red Hot Patriot: The Kick-Ass Wit of Molly Ivins played “its 5–1/2 weeks at 95 percent capacity. To give some context, the company’s previous best-sellers were Grey Gardens (2009) at $202,000 and The Happiness Lecture (2008) at $187,000.” The co-authors are Margaret and Allison Engel—Peggy worked 20 or 30 feet from me at the Lorain (Ohio) Journal. Congrats to both!
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‘Red Hot Patriot: The Kick-Ass Wit of Molly Ivins’: My Q. & A. with playwright Margaret Engel
A black mongrel dog scampers across the stage, “dragging a leash and a canoe paddle.”
Her owner yells for the dog by her proper name, “Shit”—an ever-handy expletive for a Texas oilman’s red-headed daughter, grouchy about the status quo.
This is the populist journalist Molly Ivins at home, in a new play by Margaret (Peggy) Engel and her sister, Allison. With the blessing of the Ivins estate, the twins have deftly stitched together an Ivins soliloquy from her actual writings.
Ivins wrote best-selling books and syndicated columns and fired up hundreds of young reporters, only to die of breast cancer in 2007 at 62. But if Kathleen Turner’s acting is as good as the script I read the other day, even Molly’s barefoot ghost might have to double-check the death certificate.
The play’s debut, March 19 through April 18, is in Philadelphia. Ahead is an edited email interview with Peggy Engel (right in photo by Mark Berndt), former Washington Post reporter, ex-managing editor of the Newseum and long-time director of the Alicia Patterson Foundation. Peggy and I have been friends for decades, starting with her first newspaper job in Lorain, Ohio, near Cleveland. Peggy now lives in Bethesda, Maryland; Allison, in Los Angeles, where she is director of communications at the University of Southern California.
Q. Tell us more about who Molly was. Which other writer, dead or alive, was she most like in her humor and some other respects? Admirers say Ambrose Bierce or even Mark Twain.
She was hilariously funny. She was so smart and her wit just sparkled. She was a combination of Bierce and Twain and Will Rogers, with some of that caustic humor that Ann Richards possessed.
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Molly Ivins, ‘Red Hot Patriot’: A play and a bio—and some ‘Scandals’-style uppitiness
The late Molly Ivins, subject of a new biography, as well as a forthcoming play called Red Hot Patriot, never met two fellow newspaper types named Wendy Blevin and Jonathan Stone.
And why should she have? They’re fictitious—both Wendy (daughter of Morrison T. Blevin, the skilled bagger of both ducks and fighter-plane contracts—from his hunting-lodge guests) and Jon (the reporter protagonist of The Solomon Scandals).
Still, I can imagine some boozy bull-sessions, among the three characters, over commonalities beyond just newspapering and sass.
Molly Ivins dissed the richest and the snobbiest of Texas. She grew up amid oil tycoons and yacht owners and acquaintances like the Bush family, one of whose members, Dubya, she would lovingly immortalize as Shrub. The New York Time was not the right place for even a Smith alum who went barefoot in the city room, or for copy with felicities such as “gang pluck” (to describe a chicken-kill). But Ivins thrived as a muckraker—especially at the Texas Observer—and as an author and speaker. Ivins’s syndicated column reached hundreds of newspapers. She died in 2007 at 62 of cancer, reliably outspoken and witty to the end. “Having breast cancer is massive amounts of no fun,” she said. “First they mutilate you; then they poison you; then they burn you. I have been on blind dates better than that.”
You might also enjoy:- ‘Red Hot Patriot’ play is B’way-bound for sure if Philly gross is any hint: $437K in single-ticket sales
- ‘Red Hot’ Engel sisters, possible iPad edition, Henry Adams and ‘Scandalize your classroom’
- ‘Red Hot Patriot: The Kick-Ass Wit of Molly Ivins’: My Q. & A. with playwright Margaret Engel
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