read by Christopher Plummer. A live-action Madeline film based on several of the books appeared in 1998, directed by Daisy von Scherler Mayer and starring Hatty Jones as Madeline, Frances McDormand as Miss Clavel, and Nigel Hawthorne as Lord Covington. Bemelmans's first novel, Madeline, was briefly satirized on a February 2020 episode of Saturday Night Live by comedian and drag performer Ru Paul. Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep Bemelmans novel Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep (1943) was adapted by Elaine Ryan for the stage in 1949. The production was produced and directed by Hume Cronyn and combined professional actors with drama students at Stanford University. Performed at Stanford's Memorial Theatre during July 1949, the production starred Jessica Tandy and Akim Tamiroff, with Jeanne Bates, Feodor Chaliapin, Milton Parsons and Roberta Haynes as the supporting professionals. Cronyn sold the rights for his staging of the play to new producers Nancy Stern and George Nichols III, who after a tryout in Philadelphia, took it to Broadway. The production opened at the Broadhurst Theatre on March 2, 1950. It starred Fredric March as the General and his wife Florence Eldridge as Miss Graves, with Jacqueline Dalya, Milton Parsons, Henry Lascoe, Rick Jason, Booth Colman, Stefan Schnabel, Charles Chaplin Jr., and many others. Bemelmans was involved with the design of the production and present for the tryouts and Broadway performances. As with many of the author's novels, Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep consists of a great many character sketches, location changes, and improbable events. Critc John Chapman identified this writing style as the ultimate problem with the stage production: If anybody is to be reprimanded in this dispatch, it probably should be Mr. Bemelmans for being such a loose and dizzy writer--- but this would be impolite, impertinent and ungrateful, for this gay, raffish author of Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep wrote a story which is a gem of impish, sophisticated and sardonic humor. When Miss Ryan set out to translate his verbal whimseys into the more solid statements of the stage, she handed herself a whale of a job. Reviewer Louis Scheaffer held the same opinion about the difficulty in adapting Bemelmans for the stage, recognizing that the author's characters are nothing like what theatregoers are used to, and the course of events won't fit neatly into the usual genres. But he also held a