[In the following excerpt from a review of several plays, Simon presents an unfavorable assessment of the stage version of Up against It.]

Up Against It was a screenplay, the last work of Joe Orton before his lover murdered him and killed himself. The producer who bought it for a pretty penny did not make the movie (initially intended for the Beatles); whether this was because the scandal proved too great or the script too puny I cannot say. Judging from the musical Tom Ross and Todd Rundgren have fashioned from it, whatever the screenplay may be like, its sleep should not have been disturbed.

It would be hopeless to try to summarize the scattershot plot. It is a chase story involving a young hero and his two mates in the England (sort of) of the sixties. There is picaresque adventure aplenty, involving a lovely but money-hungry heroine, who dumps the hero in favor of a millionaire prison warden. There is also a bad priest, a ferocious female chief of police, a comically swooning parlormaid in love with the hero, an obese gnome of a woman prime minister, a female revolution and male counterrevolution, and characters who keep disappearing only to resurface in new and stranger guises. In short, chaos.

Joe Papp, usually so prodigal with the taxpayers' money, has stinted on this one, with cut-rate direction by Kenneth Elliott and mingy sets by B. T. Whitehill. The cast is a mixed bag, with Stephen Temperley, Alison Fraser, Roger Bart, and, in particular, the persuasively acting, singing, and British-sounding Philip Casnoff doing very nicely indeed. But several others fail to score, and Mari Nelson, a brand-new graduate of Juilliard, though pretty, might seriously consider getting reimbursed for her tuition fees. Tom Ross, of the Public Theater's staff, has wrested little sense or shape from the story (which Orton might have revised), and Rundgren has further burdened it with songs that are not intoxicating, merely toxic. …