The Ritz (play)

The Ritz is a play by Terrence McNally. Rita Moreno won a Tony Award for her performance as Googie Gomez in the 1975 Broadway production, which she and many others of the original cast reprised in a 1976 film version directed by Richard Lester.

The farce is set in a gay bathhouse in Manhattan, where unsuspecting heterosexual Cleveland businessman Gaetano Proclo has taken refuge from his homicidal mobster brother-in-law, Carmine Vespucci. There Gaetano stumbles across an assortment of oddball characters, including a rabid chubby chaser, go-go boys, a squeaky-voiced detective, and Googie Gomez, a third-rate Puerto Rican entertainer with visions of Broadway glory who mistakes him for a famous producer and whom he mistakes for a man in drag. Further complications arise when Gaetano's wife Vivian tracks him down and jumps to all the wrong conclusions about his sexual orientation.

McNally was playwright-in-residence at Yale University and, while there, wrote a play titled The Tubs which was slang for the "baths". The play was presented at Yale Repertory Theatre in 1974. It was chosen to be produced on Broadway, but the title was changed because a play with a similar title was already playing in New York City. The Tubs title was also a nod to one of the jokes of the play, "an infatuation for overstuffed men by 'chubby chasers.'"

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