ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Saturday, September 14, 1996 TAG: 9609180051
SECTION: SPECTATOR PAGE: S-1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: BEVERLY HILLS, CALIF.
SOURCE: BOB THOMAS ASSOCIATED PRESS
If Neil Simon had stuck to his plan, television viewers would be watching ``Chicago Suite'' on Sunday night.
Instead, NBC is offering Simon's adaptation of his play ``London Suite'' (airing at 9 on WSLS-Channel 10) with a cast of mostly TV names such as Kelsey Grammer, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Jonathan Silverman, Michael Richards, Kristen Johnston and Richard Mulligan.
``London Suite'' concludes Simon's hotel trilogy that included the stage and screen versions of ``Plaza Suite'' and ``California Suite.'' The playwright's original plan was to go midcontinent.
``But I didn't know how `Chicago Suite' would be very different from `Plaza Suite,''' he remarked over a restaurant pasta lunch. ``It seemed to me that when people go to a hotel in Chicago, they're on business, strictly business. It's a great, great city, but it's not as much a sightseeing city as New York or L.A.
``I thought since I had success with the two British characters in `California Suite' played by Maggie Smith and Michael Caine, I thought I could handle that again.''
The two characters are played by Grammer, in a subdued role far removed from ``Frasier,'' and Patricia Clarkson of ``Murder One.''
Simon wrote the four stories as one-act plays, then interwove them into a single play. He first dealt with the Grammer-Clarkson characters. Then he added the sequence in which Michael Richards lies on the hotel floor with a slipped disk, just before he was supposed to leave for the Wimbledon tennis tournament.
``That was me,'' Simon admitted with a painful twinge. ``Only it was worse with me. I was there for three days and three nights. For four days, I had been going to the matches and sitting in seats that were built for people who were 4-feet-8 back in 1856.
``Also, I learned that the chairs and couches in London hotels go down all the way to the floor. So getting up puts pressure on your back. I got up out of the seat and I went right down on my face. I couldn't move.''
Out of that excruciating event came a hilarious sequence in ``London Suite,'' which illustrates how the creative genius of Simon operates.
Already the most successful playwright in modern theater history, at 69, Simon shows no sign of slowing down. This fall will bring the publication of his autobiography, ``Rewrites,'' which tells the real events of his life. He has already dramatized many of them in plays from ``Come Blow Your Horn'' to ``Laughter on the 23rd Floor.''
``It was a revelation to me, some of the things in the book,'' he remarked. ``You don't know what you're going to write about until you get there. You don't have it all in your head - which is the fun of doing it.''
His 30th play, ``Proposals,'' will open at the Ahmanson Theater in Los Angeles next spring, then tour to Minneapolis-St. Paul, Denver and Washington, D.C., before heading to New York.
``It's not the kind of play you can explain in one sentence, like `The Odd Couple,''' he said. ``For that, I said to Paramount: `Two divorced men living together, and they have the same fights they had with their wives.'
```Proposals' has nine people. It's all interconnected. It's a lot about young people - there are five in the play. There's a mother and father and a black couple, so there's a relationship between them. I find it interesting.''
He wrote the play five years ago, then set it aside. Because he believed the Broadway theater was no longer ``play-friendly'' (``London Suite'' appeared off-Broadway), he turned ``Proposals'' into a movie script. When four studios offered to buy it, he decided to return to the play form, reasoning, ``I can always do it as a movie.''
``The audiences have changed,'' he said of today's Broadway. ``They come from all over the world - they're tourists, because America's a cheaper place to visit. They want spectacles, so they go to see `Phantom of the Opera.' When they don't speak the language well, they can still enjoy it as a musical.
``Half those musicals have either been running for 10 years or are revivals. So if you go to the theater and see everything, you don't have to go back for about two years. The stuff doesn't turn over that much.
``The [nonmusical] plays cost so much money to put on: $1.5 million. In terms of `Proposals' being finished [ready for New York], we'd be finished by the end of the eight-week Ahmanson run. But we go out on the tour to help pay back some of the cost of the play.''
LENGTH: Medium: 86 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: 1. Kelsey Grammer (from left), Kristen Johnston, Juliaby CNBLouis-Dreyfus Jonathan Silverman and Michael Richards star in
``London Suite,'' airing Sunday night at 9 on WSLS-Channel 10.
color. 2. (headshot) Simon.