by Craig Hamrick

Maybe Tuesday...Maybe Not

In 1957, Maybe Tuesday was a very short-lived Broadway comedy with several TV connections. It featured actors who would go on to successful television careers, and was written by noted TV scribes Mel Tolkin and Lucille Kallen. They'd written dozens of sketches performed by Imogene Coca and Sid Caesar on their TV classic Your Show of Shows, which aired from 1950 to 1954 on NBC.

Cast members would go on to star on a soap opera, a game show, and in prime time.

The plot of Maybe Tuesday sounds like a TV sitcom: Seven career girls living together in an apartment on Manhattan's Upper West Side are in search of husbands. It was a bit racier than TV shows of the time, though; in the course of the story, one of the bachelor girls, Katy (film actress Patricia Smith), learned that she was pregnant.

Louis Edmonds (later Langley on All My Children) played Leonard, Katy's eccentric boss. Film actor Richard Derr played Mark, the dad-to-be.

Each girl had her own amusing quirks. Not-too-bright Adelle (Zohra Lampert) was accident-prone and big-hearted. Florence (Brett Somers, later a staple on the classic Match Game) was a wisecracker with a booming voice. One reviewer wrote, "Brett Somers makes the most of an off-beat voice and the dependable 'Oh yeah?' approach to her roommates' problems."

Mildred (Myra Carter) was a bespectacled, TV-addicted wallflower. Jackie and Vivian (Midge Ware and Sybil Lamb) were seductive man-hunters. And one roommate was heard but never seen: Carol Gustafson played Miss Kitchell, who was always offstage, on the telephone or in the bathroom.

Alice Ghostley (later Esmerelda on Bewitched) stopped the show with a critically acclaimed cameo as Mark's sister-in-law, who visited the girls' apartment and gave them a peek at what married life is like. On a rare visit to Manhattan, the suburban housewife hobbled in, wearing a pair of new shoes that were too tight, and tried to convince the girls that married life, with a brood of three kids, was bliss.

The New York Herald Tribune's Richard Kerr wrote that Alice "makes a straight ten minutes extremely funny by glaring insanely at everything anybody else says, and who succeeds in making her own way to the nearest exit with a magnificent corn-plaster limp."

Louis Edmonds' character, Leonard, was a fast-talker with the peculiar hobby of carrying a bulky tape recorder strapped to his body and thrusting the microphone in other characters' faces. One reviewer described Leonard as "a man dedicated to recording for posterity the vanishing sounds of a metropolis and the speech of its people."

Critics praised the work of the cast, but the play itself got bad reviews. The Daily Mirror's Critic Robert Coleman thought the play was poorly executed. "[The writers] have fashioned intriguing characters, equipped them with amusing gags, but haven't dug very deeply into their minds and hearts. It's all cut too thin, though it has a surface glitter," he wrote.

However, Coleman admitted that the opening-night audience didn't seem to agree with him: "The first-nighters embraced it more than effectively," he wrote. "They fairly roared, sometimes even before the wisecracks were delivered, and put blisters on their palms via frantic applause."

Maybe Tuesday opened on Wednesday, January 29, 1958, and closed the following Saturday, after only five performances -- ironically, not making it to Tuesday. It was performed at The Playhouse, and directed by Elliot Silverstein.

A snobbish write-up in the April 1958 issue of Theatre Arts dismissed the play as an "innocuous little comedy" not worthy of a stage presentation: "If there is a moral here, it is probably that the legitimate theatre has standards that are essentially higher than those prevailing in movie palaces and among television viewers. In either of those other mediums, the play's theme of seven pretty working girls sharing an apartment would be enough to guarantee a passing mark."