Barefoot in the Park virtually walks away with the show as her bemused mother." Barefoot in the Park Barefoot in the Park is a romantic comedy by Neil Simon. The play premiered on Broadway in 1963, and starred Robert Redford and Elizabeth Ashley. The play was made into a film in 1967, also starring Redford (and Jane Fonda). The play opened on Broadway at the Biltmore Theatre on October 23, 1963 and closed on June 25, 1967 after 1,530 performances. This was Neil Simon's longest-running hit, and the tenth longest-running non-musical play in Broadway history. Directed by Mike Nichols, the cast starred Elizabeth Ashley
Jane Fonda Kael, in her "New Yorker" review of the film, noted of Fonda: "[She] has been a charming, witty nudie cutie in recent years and now gets a chance at an archetypal character. Fonda goes all the way with it, as screen actresses rarely do once they become stars. She doesn’t try to save some ladylike part of herself, the way even a good actress like Audrey Hepburn does, peeping at us from behind “vulgar” roles to assure us she’s not really like that. Fonda stands a good chance of personifying American tensions and dominating our movies in the seventies as