Thanks to all who played my very first contest to win tickets to Chicago Shakespeare Theater’s Private Lives! The winner has been contacted and tickets have been arranged, so if you played and haven’t been contacted, your number wasn’t drawn…this time!
The one requirement for entering the raffle was to supply a fun factoid on Private Lives playwright Noël Coward. Some samples from participants:
- Coward’s mother had him audition for The Goldfish, a children’s play, which marks his first professional stage performance.
- Although Noël Coward was gay, he had a strong distaste for penetrative sex. (My personal favorite, courtesy of Monica over at Fragments.)
- He played Elyot in Private Lives alongside Gertrude Lawrence (as Amanda) in London in 1930 and then on Broadway the following season. Laurence Olivier played the jilted Victor Prynne.
- In Romantic Comedy in Hollywood, James Harvey observes of Private Lives that “nearly all moments of liberated feeling in Coward’s play tend to be moments of triumphantly recovered childhood.”
Gertrude Lawrence and Noël Coward
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