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Rare 1944 BELASCO THEATER PROGRAM Los Angeles MAID IN THE OZARKS Hillbilly Play
Rare 1944 BELASCO THEATER PROGRAM Los Angeles MAID IN THE OZARKS Hillbilly Play
Rare 1944 BELASCO THEATER PROGRAM Los Angeles MAID IN THE OZARKS Hillbilly Play
Rare 1944 BELASCO THEATER PROGRAM Los Angeles MAID IN THE OZARKS Hillbilly Play
Rare 1944 BELASCO THEATER PROGRAM Los Angeles MAID IN THE OZARKS Hillbilly Play
Rare 1944 BELASCO THEATER PROGRAM Los Angeles MAID IN THE OZARKS Hillbilly Play
Rare 1944 BELASCO THEATER PROGRAM Los Angeles MAID IN THE OZARKS Hillbilly Play
Rare 1944 BELASCO THEATER PROGRAM Los Angeles MAID IN THE OZARKS Hillbilly Play
Rare 1944 BELASCO THEATER PROGRAM Los Angeles MAID IN THE OZARKS Hillbilly Play
Rare 1944 BELASCO THEATER PROGRAM Los Angeles MAID IN THE OZARKS Hillbilly Play
Rare 1944 BELASCO THEATER PROGRAM Los Angeles MAID IN THE OZARKS Hillbilly Play
Rare 1944 BELASCO THEATER PROGRAM Los Angeles MAID IN THE OZARKS Hillbilly Play

Rare 1944 BELASCO THEATER PROGRAM Los Angeles MAID IN THE OZARKS Hillbilly Play

$ 26.17

Availability: 100 in stock
  • Original/Reproduction: Original
  • Condition: Excellent Condition. Penned Notation and Date on Title / Cast Page. Ticket Stubs and Day Program Pasted In. Lovely & Rare 16 pg. Souvenir Program from 1944. Measures 8.5 x 11 Inches. Additional programme from the day, ticket stubs, and parking stub are spot-pasted inside. Last photo shown is a scan of the full back cover.
  • Restocking Fee: No
  • Refund will be given as: Money Back
  • All returns accepted: Returns Accepted
  • Item must be returned within: 30 Days
  • Return shipping will be paid by: Buyer

    Description

    4312-File
    Rare 1944 BELASCO THEATER PROGRAM Los Angeles MAID IN THE OZARKS Hillbilly Play
    This is one of many great vintage & antique items
    we're currently listing from various estates. Please take
    a look at our store categories and merchandise.
    The comedic play, "Maid in the Ozarks" was apparently a farce that employed the hillbilly stereotype as a stock character. It never received a good review and for a while was even billed as "the worst play in the world." But it had a remarkable run that stretched across two decades and across the width of this nation and even made it to Broadway.
    Written by playwright Claire Parrish, "Maid in the Ozarks" was first staged in 1940 in Los Angeles where Claire Parrish was living and then made its way across the nation. The play was a burlesque-like tale about "a mountain youth who brings a town girl to his family cabin (in northwest Arkansas in the Arkansas Ozarks) to be his bride and the troubles that ensue when she poses (in the nude) for a visiting artist." It was obviously a farce that played to the hillbilly image and was designed not for the serious theater-goer, but for those folks who liked burlesque-like humor. It was destined to receive scathing reviews wherever it played. Many reviews described its rustic setting and the fact that most of the cast spoke in "ersatz hillbilly twangs." Another one said that "'Maid in the Ozarks' was a libel on the Ozark Country." When it played Chicago, an Associated Press story said, "Staggering for the first few weeks, the "Maid" slowly caught on until, after ten weeks, sophisticated play-goers were more astonished than amused to see the unpretentious vehicle playing to capacity audiences."
    One article said that Claire Parrish "packed her show with all the stock mountain characters known to the trade. There is the pipe-smoking grandmother, the nit-wit son, a social case worker, a drunk and two city girls to vie with the mountain women. [...] Add to this, bedbugs and vermin, squalor, bedroom crockery, boys tickling their foreheads with earthworms, and a few expectedly maudlin seduction scenes." Another review said that the play's "long suit is actually scatology ~ lice, bedbugs, belches, outhouses, bare and dirty feet planted on the breakfast table. These intended guffaw-getters are complemented by such basic hillbilly humors as drunken lechers, gabbling halfwits and twitching hags."