- Performances: 1,007
- Open / Close: November 27, 1962 – April 24, 1965
- Theater: Playhouse
- Tony Awards: Two nominations, for Paul Ford as Lead Actor and for George Abbott as Best Director. Abbott would win a Best Director Tony that year but for “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum” that also opened in 1962.
Podcast
The only sure solution to talking about a wretched production is to have a funny and fun guest and that is certainly the case here! Dr. Jesse Rabinowitz takes what could have been a relentless bashing of this show and expands it into a broader consideration of the evolution of comedy.
First, a bit of service journalism: in this time of quarantine and distancing, you may stumble upon the movie “Never Too Late” on Amazon or YouTube and think, “well, the play ran for 2.5 years on Broadway, maybe I should give it a try.” For the love of all that is holy, DO NOT watch it! I did and I’m still recovering from the psychological damage.
A relic filled with only the worst gender stereotypes, “Never Too Late” is the story of a later-in-life couple that finds out they’re unexpectedly pregnant. This prompts, among other ridiculous things, the couple’s 20-something daughter, still living at home with her new husband, to become rabid in her desire to also get pregnant.
- Fun Fact: This show opened just after “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” and just before “Oliver!” and it ended up running longer than both of them (664 & 774 performances respectively). It’s dispiriting enough that this is simply a bad show but it’s crazy when you think it opened during the same season as these classics. What was wrong with people back then?
With the caveat that I couldn’t find any clips from the stage version of this story so my opinion is forged solely from suffering through the movie version, no single interaction or reaction involving the main characters in this story feels genuine in any way. No humans are actually depicted, just horrible sitcom facsimiles of people. While watching, I never laughed, I smiled perhaps twice, and I had to stop and walk away several times.
Lead actors Paul Ford (as Charlie) and Maureen O’Sullivan come directly from the stage version and they’re awful. Ford is supposed to be one of those “lovable crank” characters but he’s frankly just an asshole. While O’Sullivan is sweet enough in a vacant kind of way, once she starts fake-fainting to get her husband to stop yelling at her, any empathy dissolves.
- Fun Fact #2: O’Sullivan was 51-years old when the Broadway show opened, then an even more improbably pregnant 54 when the movie premiered.
In one of those draconian changes that probably was hurtful at the time, stage actors Fran Sharon and Orson Bean are replaced as the daughter and son-in-law by the comely Connie Stevens and handsome Jim Hutton in the movie. Stevens and Hutton were two up-and-coming actors at the time and are featured prominently in the promotion of the movie.
Bean would go on to be a regular game show raconteur while Sharon would toil away in soap operas. Regardless of who played these characters, it’s hard to imagine them being anything but awful. The daughter is a spoiled screechy little brat. The son-in-law earns some sympathy early on when he’s being constantly brow-beaten by Charlie but, as more of his latent sexism manifests, he becomes nearly as odious as Charlie.
- Fun Fact #3: Jim Hutton’s son, Timothy Hutton, was often lauded for getting an Oscar for his “screen debut” in “Ordinary People.” He actually first appeared on film in “Never Too Late,” a 2-second scene where he plays Charlie’s 5-year old son in the future. (Take my word for it that this scene exists; again, do NOT rent this movie…)
The sexist lines tossed out (presumably for laughs) are simply repugnant. The men deride the daughter (who has to take on domestic duties because of her mother’s ‘condition’) about fixing meals. “It’s late: where’s dinner?” They do this more than once. The frazzled daughter complains about how she hasn’t been able to fix her hair or makeup, and the dad says, “at least you look used for a change.” What does that even mean?
Worst is the premise that powers most of the alleged comedy: the burden the pregnancy supposedly places on Charlie. Yes, the husband of the pregnant woman is depicted as the victim. Not only is he embarrassed because everyone now knows he still has sex with his wife, but he is subject to endless “female nonsense” related to baby preparation. The pregnancy is seen as the biggest possible delight for the mom-to-be while late in the action a bedraggled Charlie actually exclaims, “You’re not having the baby: I am!” Again: huh?
- Fun Fact #4: Both Maureen O’Sullivan and Fran Sharon had real-life experience with late-in-life pregnancy. O’Sullivan had her youngest of 7 children when she was 40 years old (her third child was Mia Farrow). Sharon married actor Ed Kemmer who was 18 years her senior and who was 54-years old when their 3rd child was born.
Shockingly, critics were generally positive about the show. In a survey of Norman Lear’s career (Lear produced the show), the author states “[s]ome critics gasped in horror that [unplanned parenthood] could be treated in fun, while the majority delighted in the…portrayal of the theme.” It is heartening, however, that some critics at the time realized what a dud “Never Too Late” was. The Harvard Crimson review of the stage production generously describes it as “one of your ungainly, amateurish, American homely-grown situation comedies built entirely out of comfortably familiar set-em-up-and-knock-em-down gag lines.”
The NYT review of the movie says its characters “hash and rehash the same jokes that clobbered the Broadway suckers,” singling out the daughter / son-in-law plot as “ring[ing] all the changes on one very limp domestic joke that were rung on the stage.” As a testament to its inferiority, “Never Too Late,” has not persisted as a regional favorite like many other Broadway hits of that era; one of the only notifications of a regional production I could find was a 2014 run in Augusta, Georgia.
Maybe the only silver lining on this darkly cloudy recess of Broadway’s past is that the team behind the movie version, Lear and Bud Yorkin, would go on to collaborate on TV’s “All in the Family,” built from many identical pieces (down to the wife being named Edith in both). If, as Ron Fassler posits in this very helpful recollection, Lear and Yorkin were warming up to that landmark series with “Never Too Late,” then perhaps it’s worth acknowledging its existence. Perhaps…
- Final Grade: D.