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Maureen Arthur, who starred on Broadway and the big screen as the ambitious mistress and secretary Hedy La Rue in How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, has died. She was 88.

Arthur died Wednesday of natural causes at her home in Beverly Hills after a long bout with Alzheimer’s disease, her brother Gerald told The Hollywood Reporter.

The vivacious Arthur also portrayed a nudie-magazine cover girl opposite Don Knotts and Edmond O’Brien in The Love God? (1969), a divorced woman who romances Bob Hope in How to Commit Marriage (1969) and an office tramp alongside John Phillip Law in The Love Machine (1971), based on a Jacqueline Susann novel.

Arthur played the bubble-headed Hedy in the national touring company of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, which had opened on Broadway in October 1961 en route to a spectacular run of more than 1,400 performances,...

Network: Amazon. Episodes: 40 (half-hour). Seasons: Four. TV show dates: December 23, 2014 -- February 15, 2018. Series status: Cancelled. Performers include: Gael García Bernal, Lola Kirke, Peter Vack, Gael García Bernal, Bernadette Peters, Malcolm McDowell, Bob Dishy, Hannah Dunne, Constantine Maroulis, Joshua Bell, Jennifer Kim, Griffin Birney, Matt Braver, Tom Bateman, John Anderson, Gabriel Millman, Rachel Zeiger-Haag, Eddie K. Robinson, Philip Jackson Smith, and Erica Yang. TV show description:      Based on the critically-acclaimed memoir Mozart in the Jungle: Sex, Drugs & Classical Music by Blair Tindall, this dramedy series takes a look at what happens behind the curtains at the New York Symphony. It turns out that backstage is just as captivating as what happens on stage. Artistic dedication and creativity collide with mind games, politicking and survival instincts.

By Todd Garbarini

Cy Howard’s 1970 film Lovers and Other Strangers, which stars Bea Arthur, Bonnie Bedelia, Michael Brandon, Anne Jackson, Diane Keaton, and Cloris Leachman, celebrates it’s 45th anniversary this year. The Royale Laemmle Theater in Los Angeles will be holding a special one-night-only showing of the 104-minute comedy on Wednesday, May 20, 2015 at 7:30 pm. Scheduled to appear in person are actress Bonnie Bedelia, Cloris Leachman and the Oscar-nominated co-writers Joe Bologna and Renee Taylor for a post-screening Q&A with film critic Stephen Farber.

From the press release:

Lovers And Other Strangers was nominated for three Academy Awards in 1970 and won the Oscar for best original song, "For All We Know." This sharp and poignant comedy examines the relationships of a dozen characters involved in preparing for a family wedding. The superb ensemble cast includes Oscar winners Gig Young, Cloris Leachman, and Diane Keaton (in her first...

Network: Amazon

Episodes: Ongoing (half-hour)

Seasons: Ongoing

TV show dates: December 23, 2014 -- present

Series status: Has not been cancelled

Performers include: Gael García Bernal, Lola Kirke, Peter Vack, Gael García Bernal, Bernadette Peters, Malcolm McDowell, Bob Dishy, Hannah Dunne, Constantine Maroulis, Joshua Bell, Jennifer Kim, Griffin Birney, Matt Braver, Tom Bateman, John Anderson, Gabriel Millman, Rachel Zeiger-Haag, Eddie K. Robinson, Philip Jackson Smith, and Erica Yang.

TV show description:

Based on the critically-acclaimed memoir Mozart in the Jungle: Sex, Drugs & Classical Music by Blair Tindall, this dramedy series takes a look at what happens behind the curtains at the New York Symphony. It turns out that backstage is just as captivating as what happens on stage. Artistic dedication and creativity collide with mind games, politicking and survival instincts.

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Tony Award voters may have been falling slowly for the musical Once, which won eight prizes (including Best Musical), but theater fans at home weren’t quite as enthused. Despite the efforts of Neil Patrick Harris and special award winner Hugh Jackman, the CBS telecast posted its worst ratings ever. In the days that followed, a bunch of Broadway shows announced plans to close: Anything Goes (Aug. 5), Godspell (June 24), The Lyons (July 1), and A Streetcar Named Desire (July 22). Three other new productions — Don’t Dress for Dinner, Other Desert Cities (featuring Tony winner Judith Light), and Venus in Fur (starring...

A constituent angrily tells a politician, "You've become a bottle of smoke," in John Patrick Shanley's new drama, "Storefront Church," which is about the nature of faith with a capital F.

Written and directed by Shanley, a Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award winner, the intense drama about several related crises of faith opened in a quirky yet searing production Monday night off-Broadway at Atlantic Theater Company's newly renovated Linda Gross Theater.

Featuring an accomplished cast, the edgy "Storefront Church" completes what Shanley calls his "Church and State" trilogy, following his 2004 "Doubt" (which won a drama Pulitzer) and his 2006 "Defiance." Thrown together by a mortgage crisis, a basically decent, ethically-conflicted, fictional Bronx borough president and a high-minded preacher who's a Katrina refugee from New Orleans square off in an intense confrontation about their individual commitments to their social and spiritual beliefs.

Giancarlo Esposito is scrappy and cynical as up-and-coming politician Donaldo Calderon,...

Atlantic Theater Company Neil Pepe, Artistic Director Jeffory Lawson, Managing Director presents the world premiere of Storefront Church, written and directed by Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award winner John Patrick Shanley and starring Bob Dishy, Giancarlo Esposito, Zach Grenier, Ron Cephas Jones and Tonya Pinkins.Storefront Church will begin previews Wednesday, May 16 officially open Monday, June 11 and play a limited engagement through Sunday, June 24 Off-Broadway as the first production to return to Atlantics main stage Linda Gross Theater in Chelsea following completion of a historic 8.3M renovation.

The York Theatre Company (James Morgan, Producing Artistic Director) is proud to announce the return engagement of its acclaimed production of Enter Laughing: The Musical. Performances will begin Wednesday, January 21st, and continue until March 8th only; all performances will be at the company's home at The Theatre at Saint Peter's (Lexington Avenue just south of 54th Street). Stuart Ross (Forever Plaid) directs a cast that features Josh Grisetti ("The Knights of Prosperity") as David Kolowitz, "La Law's" married couple Jill Eikenberry and Michael Tucker as his parents, Bob Dishy (Tony Award? nominee and Drama Desk Award winner for Sly Fox; Flora The Red Menace, The Price) as Marlowe, and Marla Schaffel (Tony Award? nominee and Drama Desk Award winner for Jane Eyre) as Angela, along with Paul Binotto, Ray DeMattis, Erick Devine, Betsy Dilellio, Gerry McIntyre, Robb Sapp, Emily Shoolin, and Allison Spratt. Matt Castle is the Music...

Shoemaker/Broken Sole Prods.

NEW YORK -- The title of this three-part drama is a play on words. A Broken Sole refers not only to a damaged pair of shoes, but also the psyche of their owner. Sole, soul -- get it?

Sorry to be so obvious, but that's about the same level of subtlety evident throughout the film, directed by Antony Marsellis and featuring a screenplay by Susan Charlotte that is all too obviously based on a stage play. Several notable actors, no doubt attracted by their colorful characters and the overall pseudo-profundity, are trapped in this misbegotten effort concerning the emotional aftereffects of 9/11 on a variety of New Yorkers.

The first segment, set on the fateful day itself, depicts the encounter between a traumatized woman (Judith Light) and the opera-fanatic cobber (Danny Aiello) she desperately turns to for help with the shoe that was broken when she walked all the way uptown after the disaster. The initial edginess between the pair -- he wants only to close up shop -- soon dissipates when they bond over such things as their shared love for the movie "The Garden of the Finzi-Continis."

The second segment is an equally stagy dialogue between a harried real estate broker (Laila Robins) and the eccentric cabbie (Bob Dishy) who picks her up and then practically needs to be coerced to start driving.

The last two-character episode concerns the awkward encounter during the morning after a one-night stand that has occurred between a dyslexic film director (John Shea) obsessed with palindromes and an actress (Margaret Colin).

The artificiality of the proceedings, which are marked by schematic characterizations, obvious metaphors and stilted dialogue, is not alleviated by the director's choice of visuals, which at one point includes pointed close-ups of pairs of items all too obviously meant to evoke the twin towers.

Opens

Friday, Jan. 16

"Along Came Polly" might be a lame, formulaic comedy, but it sets up entertaining sequences cleverly designed for the talents of three of its stars and has the good sense to get out of the way and let audiences enjoy their performances. Writer-director John Hamburg, who penned roles for Ben Stiller in the past, notably "Meet the Parents" and "Zoolander", again crafts a character -- a compulsive, vulnerable anal-retentive urbanite -- that is not just up Stiller's alley but up that alley, into the elevator and smack dab in the New York apartment where his Reuben Feffer lives. Similarly, Jennifer Aniston gets to play a free-spirited bohemian cheerfully out of touch with anything approaching normalcy and Hank Azaria is handed one of those foreign-accented nuts from which he can extract delirious comedy.

All this should be enough for favorable though perhaps modest boxoffice returns for Universal in mid-January. The film too often takes a clumsy approach to its comedy, overstating the obvious, running gags into the ground and stranding such talents as Philip Seymour Hoffman, Alec Baldwin and Bryan Brown with annoying, one-note characters. Throw in running gags about gastro-intestinal distress and a blind ferret, and you've got a movie that sets its comedy bar too low for the talents involved.

Reuben's profession and lifestyle are interchangeable. A risk assessor for an insurance firm, he spends his life minimizing all risk. So when he marries Lisa (Debra Messing), a woman selected by him and his computer software as the perfect mate, why are you not surprised that on the first day of his honeymoon on St. Bart's he discovers Lisa with a French scuba instructor (Azaria) deep sea diving on dry land?

Returning to New York alone, jilted and rejected, Reuben gets dragged to an art opening by his impossibly gross best friend, has-been actor Sandy Lyle (Hoffman). Here, Reuben meets grade school friend Polly Prince (Aniston), a rolling stone who likes to live life on the edge. As quickly as you can say "opposites attract," these two wind up in the sack, and Hamburg sets his own virtually risk-free course to a happy ending through dates at restaurants that serve spicy food to upset Reuben's delicate stomach, a salsa club to display his physical ineptitude and the sudden return of Reuben's wife to disrupt the budding romance.

Sequences in which Stiller deals with his gastro-intestinal anguish, awkwardly learns salsa steps from smooth Javier (Jsu Garcia) and lectures Polly on the germs in a bar's communal nut bowl are classic Stiller. Aniston's take-life-as-it-comes waitress is funny without turning into a parody. Essentially, she is a woman who ascribes her romantic failures to lifestyle preferences rather than poor relationship choices.

The remaining characters fall just shy of grotesque buffoons. Even Hoffman, who has rapidly become the character actor of choice for many directors, cannot find anything funny in the loser who is Reuben's best friend. Why would a risk assessor risk terminal embarrassment by showing up anywhere with such a personality? Ditto for Baldwin as Reuben's crude boss, Messing as the blushing bride who turns into a whore at the drop of a beach bum's drawers and Michele Lee and Bob Dishy as Reuben's parents, caricatures that only pay off in the final scene. Brown, in his first Hollywood film in a decade, gets stuck with a Richard Branson-like, risk-taking entrepreneur who is an insurance company's worst nightmare.

In his second outing as a director -- he helmed the Sundance film "Safe Men" -- Hamburg surrounds himself with a veteran crew including cinematographer Seamus McGarvey, designer Andrew Laws, costumer Cindy Evans and composer Theodore Shapiro, all of whom help him to deliver a slick package.

ALONG CAME POLLY

Universal Pictures

Jersey Films

Credits:

Writer-director: John Hamburg

Producers: Danny DeVito, Michael Shamberg, Stacey Sher

Executive producers: Jane Bartelme, Dan Levine

Director of photography: Seamus McGarvey

Production designer: Andrew Laws

Music: Theodore Shapiro

Costume designer: Cindy Evans

Editors: William Kerr, Nick Moore

Cast:

Reuben: Ben Stiller

Polly: Jennifer Aniston

Sandy: Philip Seymour Hoffman

Lisa: Debra Messing

Stan: Alec Baldwin

Leland: Bryan Brown

Javier: Jsu Garcia

Vivian: Michele Lee

Irving: Bob Dishy

Scuba instructor: Hank Azaria

Running time -- 90 minutes

MPAA rating: PG-13...