Time Out For Ginger

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Time Out For Ginger
Original Playbill for Time Out For Ginger
Written by	Ronald Alexander
Characters	Howard Carol Agnes Carol Joan Eddie Davis Ed Hoffman Ginger Lizzie Tommy Joan Mr. Wilson
Date of premiere	November 26, 1952
Genre	Comedy
Setting	The living room of the Carol house
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Time Out For Ginger is a Broadway comedy by Ronald Alexander that ran 248 performances at the Lyceum Theatre from November 26, 1952 to June 27, 1953, before becoming hugely popular in regional theatres throughout the 1950s and early 1960s. Jack Benny starred in a one-hour October 6, 1955 Shower of Stars television broadcast, and the play was later adapted into the feature film, Billie, starring Patty Duke.

The Broadway production starred Melvyn Douglas as Howard Carol, a middle-class husband and father of three girls, one of whom, Ginger (Nancy Malone), wants to try out for her school's football team. At first supportive of his daughter's goal, he begins to feel pressure from Ed Hoffman (Philip Loeb), the president of the bank where he works, and the community at large. The setting is the Carol's living room.

In 1954, several of the original cast members, including Melvyn Douglas, Nancy Malone and Philip Loeb, took the play to Chicago, where Steve McQueen replaced Broadway's Conrad Janis as Eddie Davis.^[1] Loeb had been blacklisted from television and radio several years earlier and the production was his last major role before he committed suicide on September 1, 1955.

Liza Minnelli played Ginger at the Bucks County Playhouse in 1964.^[2]

[edit] Ronald Alexander

Ronald Alexander was born Ronald George Alexander Ungerer in West New York, N.J. on February 16, 1917. He dropped out of school early and worked for a while in a factory, was a boxer, and performed as a singer with a band. He also organized Broadway performers for a unit of the USO run by his sister. On Broadway, he appeared in small roles in The Patriots, Light Up the Sky and The Closing Door.

In addition to Time Out For Ginger, Alexander wrote the Broadway comedy, Nobody Loves an Albatross, the screenplays for Return to Peyton Place and Billie, the Walt Disney TV movie, Johnny Shiloh, and several episodes of The Dick Van Dyke Show. He also wrote a sequel to Time Out For Ginger called Time and Ginger in which Ginger is married to Eddie and has to confront her own daughter's sexual rebelliousness.

Alexander died of cancer on April 24, 1995 at Calvary Hospital in the Bronx. He was 78.^[3]