Hollywood Arms is a play by Carrie Hamilton

Carrie Hamilton

Carrie Louise Hamilton was an American actress, singer, and playwright. She was the daughter of comedienne/actress Carol Burnett and producer Joe Hamilton.-Life:...

 and Carol Burnett

Carol Burnett

Carol Creighton Burnett is an American actress, comedian, singer, dancer and writer. Burnett started her career in New York. After becoming a hit on Broadway, she made her television debut...

.

Adapted from Burnett's memoir

Memoir

A memoir , is a literary genre, forming a subclass of autobiography – although the terms 'memoir' and 'autobiography' are almost interchangeable. Memoir is autobiographical writing, but not all autobiographical writing follows the criteria for memoir set out below...

 One More Time

One More Time (book)

One More Time is a memoir by comedian Carol Burnett. It was published by Random House in 1986 and became a New York Times non-fiction bestseller....

, the dramedy is set in Hollywood, California in 1941 and 1951, and centers on the heartbreak and laughter shared by three generations of women living on welfare in a dingy apartment house. The cast of characters, based on Burnett and her real-life relatives, includes no-nonsense grandmother Nanny; Louise, a beautiful, alcoholic mother determined to be a writer for movie magazines; Jody, an absent father who is struggling with his own demons; and Helen, a young girl whose only escape is the rooftop of their rundown building, where she creates her own magical world and dreams of a successful show business

Show business

Show business, sometimes shortened to show biz, is a vernacular term for all aspects of entertainment. The word applies to all aspects of the entertainment industry from the business side to the creative element ....

 career.

Hamilton never saw her work reach the stage. On January 20, 2002, she died of brain and lung cancer. Burnett, determined that the play serve as a tribute to her late daughter's memory, brought it to the Goodman Theatre

Goodman Theatre

The Goodman Theatre is a professional theater company located in Chicago's Loop. A major part of Chicago theatre, it is the city's oldest currently active nonprofit theater organization...

 in Chicago

Chicago

Chicago is the largest city in the US state of Illinois. With nearly 2.7 million residents, it is the most populous city in the Midwestern United States and the third most populous in the US, after New York City and Los Angeles...

, where it opened on April 9, 2002. Directed by Hal Prince

Hal Prince

Harold Smith Prince is an American theatrical producer and director associated with many of the best-known Broadway musical productions of the past half-century...

, the cast included Linda Lavin

Linda Lavin

Linda Lavin is an American singer and actress. She is best known for playing the title character in the sitcom Alice and for her Broadway performances.After acting as a child, Lavin joined the Compass Players in the late 1950s...

 as Nanny, Michele Pawk

Michele Pawk

Michele Pawk is an American actress and singer.-Biography:Born in Butler, Pennsylvania, Pawk attended Allegheny College and the College Conservatory of Music in Cincinnati, after which she spent a year working in a musical revue at Disney World...

 as Louise, Frank Wood

Frank Wood

Frank Wood is the name of:*Frank Wood , Iowa State Senator from the 42nd District*Frank Porter Wood , Canadian art collector*Frank Wood , American actor...

 as Jody, and Sara Niemietz

Sara Niemietz

Sara Niemietz is an American singer/songwriter and actress located in Los Angeles.-Early life and education:Niemietz was born in Chicago. In 2000, she relocated to Los Angeles, where she currently resides...

 and Donna Lynne Champlin

Donna Lynne Champlin

Donna Lynne Champlin is an actress from New York City. She is married to actor Andrew Arrow.Her burgeoning career began at the age of four, when she performed a tap solo in a local variety show...

 as the younger and older Helen, with Barbara E. Robertson, Nicolas King, Patrick Clear,and Emily Graham-Handley in supporting roles.

Reviewing it for the New York Times, Bruce Weber said,

"Borrowing from the likes of Herb Gardner and Neil Simon

Neil Simon

Neil Simon is an American playwright and screenwriter. He has written numerous Broadway plays, including Brighton Beach Memoirs, Biloxi Blues, and The Odd Couple. He won the 1991 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his play Lost In Yonkers. He has written the screenplays for several of his plays that...

, the play has the tone (if not the professionally honed structure) of A Thousand Clowns West or maybe Venice Beach Memoirs . . . [T]he narrative conforms more to the contours of biography than invented drama. That is, there's a lot that seems to be here because it was actually so, not because it suits a well-crafted tale . . . [T]he play doesn't persuasively argue that it is compelling in itself. Much of its interest has to do with the celebrity of its subject . . . It's a story of haplessness and waste and the inexorable narrowing of lives to nothing. But because this is a star's tale, and it has a happy ending, there is something sanitized, if not gilded, about it all. Circumstances never seem oppressive or as entirely unpleasant and depressing as they must, in truth, have been."

After twenty-eight previews, the Broadway

Broadway theatre

Broadway theatre, commonly called simply Broadway, refers to theatrical performances presented in one of the 40 professional theatres with 500 or more seats located in the Theatre District centered along Broadway, and in Lincoln Center, in Manhattan in New York City...

 production, also directed by Prince, opened on October 31, 2002 at the Cort Theatre

Cort Theatre

The Cort Theatre is a legitimate Broadway theatre located at 138 West 48th Street in the Theatre District of midtown Manhattan in New York City...

, where it ran for 76 performances. Most of the Chicago cast remained with the play, with Leslie Hendrix

Leslie Hendrix

Leslie Hendrix is an American actress. She is best known for playing the role of Elizabeth Rodgers on four Law & Order series...

 replacing Barbara E. Robertson. Michele Pawk won the Tony Award for Best Performance by a Featured Actress in a Play

Tony Award for Best Performance by a Featured Actress in a Play

This is a list of winners and nomination of the Tony Award for Best Performance by a Featured Actress. The award was first presented in 1947.-1940s:* 1947: Patricia Neal – Another Part of the Forest* 1949: Shirley Booth – Goodbye, My Fancy-1950s:...

.

Reviewing it again for the New York Times, Bruce Weber observed,

"In its Broadway incarnation . . . the show . . . has made strides from the version that appeared in the spring at the Goodman Theater in Chicago. Strains of seriousness and ambition are more clearly evident . . . But like the kind of teenage girl that Ms. Burnett suggests she never was, the play still suffers through a million identity crises. It reaches for the organic independence of inventive fiction but stays with the training wheels of the biographical format . . . So a play that can't make up its mind whether to be a potent family saga or an episodic comedy worthy of a laugh track ends up ignoring what it has: a potentially bruising and affecting drama about the tough life of a woman in Hollywood in the 1940's and 50's. Instead, I found myself thinking more than once that Hollywood Arms is what would have resulted if television executives had gotten their hands on a script by O'Neill

Eugene O'Neill

Eugene Gladstone O'Neill was an American playwright and Nobel laureate in Literature. His poetically titled plays were among the first to introduce into American drama techniques of realism earlier associated with Russian playwright Anton Chekhov, Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, and Swedish...

."

Lawrence Frascella of Entertainment Weekly

Entertainment Weekly

Entertainment Weekly is an American magazine, published by the Time division of Time Warner, that covers film, television, music, broadway theatre, books and popular culture...

graded it B and commented,

"[W]hile it's not the most trenchant piece of writing you'll ever experience, under Harold Prince's expert direction some very harsh material takes on a warm, appealingly nostalgic glow . . . This moving production may kick off a new media subgenre: the Broadway-bound star autobiography."

Writing for the website Talkin' Broadway, Matthew Murray said it

"has a tendency to play as little more than a series of skits, such as might have been found on Burnett's variety show. Some are comic, some are serious, but nearly all feel incomplete, different pieces of a puzzle that never come together to form a complete picture. More than once, when a scene appears ready to explode into powerful drama, the lights fade out, preventing the show from establishing a real dramatic connection with the audience. Still, a number of the elements are interesting; the show may be disconnected, but it's never boring."