Small Miracle


Small Miracle is a 1934 play by Norman Krasna, presented on Broadway with Joseph Calleia in the featured role. Directed by George Abbott with a single setting designed by Boris Aronson, the three-act melodrama opened September 26, 1934, at the John Golden Theatre, New York. It continued at the 48th Street Theatre November 11, 1934 – January 5, 1935. On February 7, 1935, the play began a run at the El Capitan Theatre in Hollywood, with Calleia, Joseph King and Robert Middlemass reprising their Broadway roles.
It was Krasna's second play, written in the evenings while he was working as a Columbia Pictures contract writer during the day. He adapted the play for the Paramount Pictures film Four Hours to Kill!.

Cast

Reception

The New Yorker called Small Miracle "a very satisfactory melodrama with Joseph Spurin-Calleia as the pleasantest murderer you ever saw."
"George Abbott's talent for accuracy of detail has given this tabloid tale of Times Square passions an uncanny, cumulative fascination," wrote drama critic Brooks Atkinson of The New York Times. Praising Boris Aronson's set design and the performances of Ilka Chase, Myron McCormick, Elspeth Eric, Joseph King and Robert Middlemass, he reserved his highest praise for the featured actor: "Joseph Spurin-Calleia as the prisoner plays with such keen authenticity and such sensitive understatement of emotion that his scenes are enormously moving. Type casting becomes an art when an actor can draw so much pulsing truth out of a character."
The Stage magazine wrote that "there have been few gangsters of the heartbreaking calibre of Joseph Spurin-Calleia's Tony Mako. To this excellent, rather quiet melodrama with its paucity of dead bodies, he gives a sure feeling of impending catastrophe."

Publication history

Small Miracle was published in 1935 by Samuel French, Inc., with a preface by George Abbott.

Adaptations

Krasna adapted Small Miracle for the Paramount Pictures film Four Hours to Kill!, released in April 1935 and starring Richard Barthelmess. In 1944, Paramount Pictures announced it would film a new adaptation of Small Miracle, starring Alan Ladd; the project was not made.