Rialto Chatter: James Lapine Adapts Moss Hart's ACT ONE for the Stage

James Lapine has reportedly been commissioned for a stage adaptation of Moss Hart's landmark autobiography, ACT ONE, by Lincoln Center Theatre's artistic director Andre Bishop.

“The impact of that book on my life — as it is on the lives of everyone we know in our world — is beyond telling,” Bishop tells the New York Post's Michael Riedel. “My favorite author is Dickens, and ‘Act One’ is a Dickensian book about the theater.”

Lapine, the Tony Award winner who won the 1985 Pulitzer Prize for Drama with Stephen Sondheim for the musical Sunday in the Park with George, will also direct the show, which is holding a workshop this weekend in Martha's Vineyard.

Act One chronicles Moss Hart's impoverished childhood in the Bronx and Brooklyn and his long, determined struggle to his first theatreical Broadway success, Once in a Lifetime.

Hart's other hits include You Can't Take It With You (1936) and The Man Who Came to Dinner (1939). You Can't Take It With You won the 1937 Pulitzer Prize for drama. In 1938, the film adaptation won the Best Picture Oscar.

One of the most celebrated American theater books of the twentieth century, Act One is filled with all the wonder, drama and heartbreak that surrounded Broadway in the 1920s and the years before World War II.