"lee allen and julie harris in marathon '33"

Playwright Joe Masteroff, best known for writing the books for She Loves Me and Cabaret, made his Broadway playwrighting debut with The Warm Peninsula. Despite a successful pre-Broadway tour, it was almost universally panned. One critic wrote that, although the play employed the “magical talents of Julie Harris and June Havoc,” it seemed “an inept and pedestrian effort, conceived in platitudes and bearing slight warmth or conviction.” But it brought Julie Harris and June Havoc together in 1959, the same year that Early Havoc, June Havoc’s autobiography, was published. Julie loved the book and implored June to write a play based on her experiences with the cruelties of the marathon dances of the Depression Era.

June agreed to write the play. “I have written Marathon ’33 as a sort of comic valentine for Julie Harris who assured me that if I could write a book, surely I could write a play. I hope I haven’t failed her. What I’ve done is write a play for Julie with dramatized, fictionalized truth. I hope it’s good enough for her.” Marathon ’33,directed by June Havoc and starring Julie Harris as June, was presented by the Actors Studio Theatre, with the entire production under the supervision of Lee Strasberg. 

June recalled her marathon days: “We danced 45 minutes out of every hour. For three hours out of every 24 your partner would carry you.” Of the grueling rehearsal period for Marathon ‘33, June said “Julie has the strength of a star. It’s safer to start her out with a dummy in the scenes where she has to carry the boy unconscious. The dummy we’re using is tall but light, we’ll increase the weight gradually to 160 pounds. It’s dangerous. Rehearsals have to be covered by an extra amount of insurance.”

Although Marathon ’33 ran for less than two months, it received critical acclaim. It was called “a fascinating and forgotten detail of a crazy period in U.S. history.” Writing in the Washington Post, Richard Coe wrote, “Julie Harris made of Baby June a brilliantly mercurial performance, one of her very finest. Miss Harris and the production reached depths of truth and understanding rarely touched in our theater.” Coe also wrote that the play was “more of a social document than a drama.”

In his review in New York’s Morning Telegraph, Whitney Bolton wrote, “Julie Harris gives the finest, most polished, most glowing performance of her career.” When the play’s closing was announced, Bolton wrote, “I never claimed that as a play it is one of the great plays, because it isn’t. But it is great theater, explosive theater, heartbreaking theater.”