Newsday's review, by my classy former colleague Blake Green, of the play The Talk of the Town (currently playing at the Algonquin's Oak Room):

Featured are characterizations of Dorothy Parker, Alexander Woollcott, Robert Benchley, Robert Sherwood, Edna Ferber, Marc Connelly and George S. Kaufman, well-known writers and personalities whose facile intelligence seems astounding compared with today's celebrity culture.

In Act 1, the Round Table members are pleased with themselves, giddy—and witty—with anticipation, slinging familiar bons mots at each other, some spoken, some sung. Some things they actually said, some are crafted "to sound like they did," Redington said the other day.

In Act 2, toward the end of the conclave's decade, familiarity has bred contempt, cynicism has crept into the mix. Benchley, the humorist and critic, played by Jared Bradshaw, sings "The Man I Could Have Been." "They're moving away from each other, going their separate ways," Dawes said.
...
The show's creators, themselves Gotham denizens married 27 years, met in another life as jingle writers. Though successful ("Plop, plop, fizz, fizz"; "We're American Airlines"), "we didn't want to be old people in the jingle business," Redington said.

Veterans of the music industry, they went back to writing and performing songs and, in the early '90s, amused by a literary collection titled "The Algonquin Wits" (edited by Robert Drennan), decided they'd hit upon a good subject for a musical.... More.