Sunday Special: Celebrating Living Legend Terrence McNally of Broadway's IT'S ONLY A PLAY

Four time Tony Award Winner Terrence McNally's IT'S ONLY A PLAY is opening this week at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre. With direction by three-time Tony Award Winner Jack O'Brien, the production stars Matthew Broderick, Nathan Lane, Stockard Channing, Rupert Grint, Megan Mullally, F. Murray Abraham, and new comer Micah Stock. In anticipation of McNally's upcoming opening night, BroadwayWorld is taking a look at his legendary career by highlighting some of our favorite McNally works from the past several decades.

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Terrence McNally was awarded the Dramatists Guild Lifetime Achievement Award in 2011. He is the winner of Tony® Awards for his plays Love! Valour! Compassion! and Master Class and his books for the musicals Ragtime and Kiss of the Spider Woman. His most recent play Mothers and Sons premiered on Broadway this spring. Other plays include Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune; Lips Together, Teeth Apart; The Lisbon Traviata; Corpus Christi; The Ritz; Some Men; A Perfect Ganesh; Bad Habits; The Stendhal Syndrome; Dedication or the Stuff of Dreams; Deuce and Unusual Acts of Devotion. In 1996 he was inducted into the Theater Hall of Fame.

Over the course of his career, McNally has been nominated and won many awards, ranging from Tony Awards, Emmy Awards, Lucille Lortel Awards, and more. His first honor was a 1975 Drama Desk Nomination for THE RITZ (Outstanding New American Play). The original cast included Rita Moreno (who won a Tony Award for her performance), as well as F. Murray Abraham (starring in the current revival of IT'S ONLY A PLAY), Jack Weston, and Jerry Stiller. The play tells the story of a gay bathhouse in New York, where a heterosexual businessman from Cleveland takes refuge in hiding from his mobster brother, not knowing the bathhouse's true purpose.

McNally's plays often incorporate gay themes, including one of his most recent pieces, MOTHERS AND SONS, which premiered on Broadway last season. Starring Tony Award winner Tyne Daly, Tony Award nominee Bobby Steggert, Frederick Weller, and Grayson Taylor, the play was nominated for two 2014 Tony Awards - Best Actress in a Play (Tyne Daly) and Best Play. In the play, mother Katharine Gerard visits her late son's ex-partner and attempts to deal with the fact that he has married and had a son since her own son's death. It ended its run on June 22nd, 2014.

McNally has a knack for dramas, proven by his 1995 play MASTER CLASS. The play won both the Drama Desk Award and the Tony Award for Best Play in 1996. Audra McDonald (Sharon) and Zoe Caldwell (Callas) both won Tonys for their performances, as well. Caldwell portrayed opera diva Maria Callas who, past her days of stardom, is holding a master class at Juilliard. The play was revived in 2011, with Tyne Daly as Callas and Sierra Boggess as Sharon.

However, McNally's body of work is also impressive in the realm of musical theatre. The first book of a musical he wrote that played on Broadway was THE RINK, which tells the story of Anna, who owns a run-down roller skating rink on a failing seaside resort, and her daughter Angel, who decides to return to town to reconnect with the people and places of her past. The show's Off-Broadway run featured a book by Albert Innaurato, and McNally was brought in for the Broadway transfer because the show was not doing well. With problems from the start, the show did not enjoy a successful run on Broadway, with negative feedback in most reviews.

McNally's next two attempts in writing for musical theatre were far more successful, though there was a considerable gap between THE RINK (1984) and his next production KISS OF THE SPIDER WOMAN (1993). It had many similarities to THE RINK, such as the casting of Chita Rivera and music and lyrics by Kander and Ebb. However, this show won the Tony Award for Best Musical, Best Score, and Best Book of a Musical, marking McNally's first Tony win. Chita Rivera, Brent Carver, and Anthony Crivello all won Tonys for their performances, as well. The musical tells the story of Luis Alberto Molina, who is a homosexual prisoner, serving his third of an eight-year sentence. Molina lives in a world of fantasies to escape from his life in prison, though one of his fantasies in particular haunts him: Aurora as the spider woman, whose kiss can kill.

Four years later, in 1996, McNally's next musical opened on Broadway: RAGTIME. McNally won his second Tony Award for Best Book of a Musical. Stephen Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens also won for Best Score, and Audra McDonald won the Tony for Best Featured Actress in a Musical. Based on E. L. Doctorow's 1975 novel of the same name, RAGTIME chronicles the lives of three groups living in the United States in the early 1900s: upper-class suburbanites, African Americans, and Eastern European immigrants. The show was revived on Broadway in 2009.

Many of McNally's shows have been revived on Broadway, including IT'S ONLY A PLAY, which was originally produced in 1986. It began Off-Off-Broadway, and then transferred to Off-Broadway, marking next week's opening night as its official opening on Broadway. The play takes place at an opening night party, while the writer, director, producer, and actors eagerly await the release of the reviews. It offers a comedic look at the backstage aspect of theatre, incorporating many business stereotypes, such as the "panicked playwright" (Matthew Broderick), the "genius director" (Rupert Grint), the "doped-up diva" (Stockard Channing), and many more colorful characters. The highly anticipated show will open on October 9 at the Schoenfeld Theatre.