About the Play:

Room Service is a full-length comedy by John Murray and Allen Boretz. This classic door-slamming, confused-identity farce tells the story of a broke Broadway producer who needs to stay in his hotel room so he can impress a backer for his surefire-hit next play, while dodging hotel management that is determined to evict him.

Room Service centers around a theatrical producer of questionable morals, Gordon Miller, who has finally discovered a formula for Broadway success: be bold, brash, and option a brilliant script by a promising young writer. What he hasn't discovered is a willing financial backer. Holed up in a second-rate Times Square hotel room with a ragtag bunch of starving actors, he attempts to rehearse and find a backer for his new show. Hoping to forestall eviction, he convinces the show's gullible young playwright to fake his own death. Meanwhile, an emissary from one of the country's wealthiest businessmen turns up, offering to invest in the show; that is, until he discovers the hotel doctor bound and gagged in the bathroom. The situation goes from bad to worse as the bill-collecting manager of the hotel threatens to have the entire show confiscated by the sheriff on opening night! As behind-the-scenes business of putting on a play becomes more frenetic, one wonders if the show will ever go on.

Room Service premiered in 1937 at the Cort Theatre and ran exactly 500 performances on Broadway, but the property is probably best known for its 1938 adaptation as a film vehicle for The Marx Brothers and Lucille Ball. But it was a huge theatrical hit before that and has been in productions all around the world ever since.

Cast: 2 female, 12 male

About the Playwright:

John Murray (1906-1984) was an American playwright best known for writing the play Room Service with Allen Boretz.

Allen Boretz (1900-1985) was an American songwriter, playwright and screenwriter. The great success of his and John Murray's Broadway hit Room Service led to offers from Hollywood, and he wrote and co-wrote screenplays from the late 1930s through the 1940s.