The Season to Come

Broadway, The Far-Famed thoroughfare that bisects lower Manhattan, moves on to Union Square, sputters joyfully as it reaches the Forties and Fifties, and then goes along uneventfully toward Yonkers, is now engaged with a new theatrical season, that of 1956-57. It well might be the most exciting season New York has known since the 1920s. Its theatres are booming. Much that is interesting has already been unfolded at this writing, and there is a great deal more to come.

The new season will place an emphasis on youth, in that numerous young players are showing up in the playhouses; it will bring forth some elaborate musical comedies and revues, and it will also go in extensively for Bernard Shaw, the (continued on page 50) Broadway ... to come(Continued from Page 27) most spectacular dramatist of our century, and for Eugene O'Neill, who came along in 1920 to set the style and change the pace for playwrights of the time. He exerted an enormous influence as he put vigor and poetry and mysticism into his writing. It was with his emergence that the American theatre acquired greater maturity and vitality than it had enjoyed before.

O'Neill's four-hour autobiographical drama, Long Day's Journey Into Night, packed with incisive dialogue and powerful in many sequences, and starring Mr. and Mrs. Fredric March, is slated for the trim little Helen Hayes Theatre. It's entirely probable that O'Neill's Marco Millions will be revived; an off-Broadway group will be presenting a series of his short plays, and a musical version of Anna Christie, called New Girl in Town, is definitely scheduled for next spring.

New-season musical pieces will include Li'l Abner, a gay charade based on Al Capp's comic strip character, with Edie Adams as star, and Candide, the musical version of the Voltaire classic, prepared by Lillian Hellman and Leonard Bernstein, featuring Max Adrian and Robert Rounsville. And then there are such important projects as Bells Are Ringing starring Judy Holliday, which will be reaching the Shubert just about the time this issue of Playboy strikes the news-stands, and Happy Hunting which is coming into the Majestic Theatre. The latter brings Ethel Merman back to the frenzy of Manhattan after some months of comparative placidity in Denver, living (continued on page 58) Broadway ... to come(continued from page 50) there as the wife of an airline executive. She loved those Rockies; loved the altitude and the clear air and the friendliness of Coloradans, but Broadway is home. It has been since she was chanting I've Got Rhythm and stopping her show of that moment. Her new one, this Happy Hunting, was written for her by those facile workmen, Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse. It's been staged by Abe Burrows, who has mastered the trick of making hits out of these expensive singing shows. He got on his way with Guys and Dolls, a sensational hit, and his directorial services have been in great demand ever since.

I've mentioned the fact that Bernard Shaw will be a dominant force in this new Broadway season. Since Saint Joan and Siobhan McKenna thrilled all of us at the downtown outpost called the Phoenix Theatre, there've been uptown plans for two other particularly fascinating Shaw plays -- Major Barbara and The Apple Cart. Barbara and her father, Andrew Undershaft, are two of the most vivid characters ever written by the great dramatist. In this production, these two roles will be played by British film pretty Glynis Johns and Charles Laughton, who will also direct. It's in Major Barbara that the girl of the title makes the discovery that her benevolent organization, the Salvation Army, receives money from distillers and munitions manufacturers, like her father. And it's in that political extravaganza, The Apple Cart, forthcoming this season, with Maurice Evans, that democracy takes a drubbing. It's a loosely constructed play and it failed when done in New York in 1930. Noel Coward, who was in a London production, is one of those predicting more success for it this time.

In speaking of Shaw, it comes to mind that his predecessor, Shakespeare, the only dramatist who could possibly be placed above him in the matter of mastery of the English language, exerts a hold upon present-day playgoers and is frequently successful as a business venture -- when his plays are done well. As these lines are put down upon a noisy and creaky Underwood that I've used in many parts of the world, London's famous Old Vic Company is coming to town with a repertoire that includes Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth and Troilus and Cressida. And as the season moves along there will be presentations of Measure for Measure and The Taming of the Shrew at the off-Broadway Phoenix, with its management working in conjunction with the American Shakespeare Festival Theatre, which has completed its second season at Stratford, Connecticut. It's Norris Houghton, Princeton graduate and co-producer at the Phoenix, who says: "To make a success of our undertaking, we have to have young people in our audiences. We have found that Shakespeare brings them in; never fails. And we've been encouraged by the news from the summer-theatre managers that more kids in their teens and more youngsters in their 20s were at the summer playhouses in 1956 than ever before in the circuit's history."

Rosalind Russell, an actress of chic and style and a sort of understated elegance, who had her romp in the musical field with the festive Wonderful Town will be back in a non-musical play, Auntie Mame. Regarding her musical comedy stint in Town, Miss Russell says, "Put it down as a fling. Thank God I got by with it, but I don't think I'll be rushing into it again." Her contract calls for playing the comedy in New York for a year. It's my guess that she'll make it. Auntie Mame, based on the Patrick Dennis book, was written by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee, who gave the theatre that valid drama, Inherit the Wind.

Additional excitement in the Broadway area will be provided by other fall offerings. Terence Rattigan, the most prolific of the London dramatists, and certainly one of the most successful, has an apparent hit in Separate Tables, presented with its imported stars, Eric Port-man and Margaret Leighton. Gilbert Miller is expecting a run with Douglas Home's comedy The Reluctant Debutante, also brought over from London, and with Rattigan's The Sleeping Prince. Michael Redgrave and Barbara Bel Geddes are now co-starred in the roles created abroad by Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh.

Sylvia Sidney, an actress who has trouped America from ocean to ocean -- she was once called the most promising young player of the season when she made a teen-age hit in a melodrama known as Crime -- will play a frustrated spinster in A Very Special Baby, in which she will be co-starred with her former husband, Luther Adler. And Elliott Nugent, an actor given to the reticent underplaying perfected by the late and great William Gillette, has a new play, Build With One Hand, written by Joseph Kramm, who won the Pulitzer Prize with The Shrike, that acrid drama of goings-on in a mental hospital. Mr. Nugent is reaching Broadway at the end of November. He plays a man who fears success. That definitely is not the theme of The Happiest Millionaire, Kyle Crichton's dramatization of Cordelia Drexel Biddle's biography of her father. This comedy will restore Walter Pidgeon to Broadway. His company will include a startling newcomer, Diana van der Vlis. Success is predicted for this young player.

Broadway's traditional production lull is to be expected during December and there will be, undoubtedly, the usual pick-up after the first of the new year. Productions to be offered early in 1957 will include Night of the Auk, a drama by Arch Oboler about the first space ship flight to the moon, starring Claude Rains; Visit to a Small Planet (Cyril Ritchard both stars and directs) more about the great outer spaces, written by Gore Vidal, and The Ballad of Baby Doe, the late John La Touche's folk opera about the silver king, H. A. W. Tabor, which seems to have been impressive in its Central City, Colorado, presentation last summer. Then there will be the Elmer Rice drama of family life which was originally called Ordeal by Fire, and will probably be produced by the Playwrights Company under the title As the Sparks Fly Upward, if they can find the right star.

There's still considerably more listed for the midtown acreage. New York's City Center, which has taken on increasing prestige under the guidance of Jean Dalrymple, is offering The Teahouse of the August Moon, with the Mexican actress, Rosita Diaz, in the role of the ubiquitous Sakini, and it will go in for other plays, and possibly for an O'Neill revival. Shelley Winters, who distinguished herself in last season's A Hatful of Rain, has a new play, Girls of Summer, written by N. Richard Nash, who wrote The Rainmaker. James M. Cain, author of such torrid best-sellers as The Postman Always Rings Twice and Serenade, has emerged as the author of The Guest in 701. Described as a psychological drama with a surprise twist, its action takes place in a smart New York hotel. And there's a comedy entitled Everybody Loves Me, the work of Mannie Manheim and Arthur Marx, that will probably be along. Jack Carson is to be starred.

More riches promised by optimistic producers include such appetizing fare as Hollywood's Katy Jurado in The Best House in Naples, F. Hugh Herbert's adaptation of an Eduardo de Filippo play about a Neapolitan brothel. Garson Kanin will probably direct the late Robert Sherwood's comedy-drama of the American Revolution, Small War on Murray Hill, with Jan Sterling and Leo Genn playing cheek-to-cheek. Mr. Genn's name is also linked with that of Faye Emerson in connection with a Herbert Berghoff-directed melodrama, Protective Custody. Married collaborators Sam and Bella Spewack (of Boy Meets Girl fame) have a comedy about Catherine the Great and Potemkin cooking: as of this writing, they're toying with the title Once There Was a Russian. Those who (concluded on page 75) Broadway ... to come(continued from page 58) admired Peter De Vries' side-splitting novel, The Tunnel of Love, will rejoice to learn that he and Joseph Fields have dramatized this tale of a cartoonist's artistic and sexual problems for the Theatre Guild. But perhaps the most impressive line-up of serious theatrical talent is connected with the projected Producers' Theatre presentation of Waltz of the Toreadors: Jean Anouilh wrote the play, Sir Ralph Richardson, they say, will star, and Harold Clurman might direct.

Representing the musical stage, Bert Lahr is being talked about as the star of a tuneful re-do of Vicki Baum's Grand Hotel, while satirist Ira Wallach has a hand in Go Fight City Hall, a musical dealing with Rev. Parkhurst's attempt to clean up New York back in the 1880s. Cleveland Amory's best-selling account of America at play, The Last Resort, will be transmuted by Jean Kerr, among others, into a musical, as will the famous archy & mehitabel stories by Don Marquis: Darion and Kleinsinger are handling words and music for this, which they'll call Shinbone Alley, if they have their way. Thirteen Daughters, Three Tigers for Tessie and Packaged in Paris are the tentative titles of other impending musicals about which I can tell you very little.

And the list is by no means complete. A Hole in the Head will star Paul Douglas as an actor who gives family obligations the shortest possible shrift; Maureen Stapleton is slated for the lead in something called Light a Penny Candle; George Abbott will perhaps direct Man on a Tiger, which treats of the tension between an ad exec and a TV comic; Ira Levin, who wrote the novel A Kiss Before Dying and moulded No Time for Sergeants into a play, will be on deck with a psychological melodrama named Interlock; and those indefatigable adaptors, Ruth and Augustus Goetz, who have made a living by dramatizing Henry James, will do the same for Storm Jameson's novel, Hidden River, which they'll call The Trade of Kings. Oddly enough, it was not the Goetzes, but Guy Bolton, who turned Henry James' Wings of the Dove into Child of Fortune for Jed Harris. Harris says Reginald Denny and Mildred Dunnock will star in this drama of a father who hires a young fellow to marry his soon-to-die daughter.

It's entirely possible that such important writers as Tennessee Williams and Paul Osborn, playwrights, and John O'Hara, the novelist, will be represented in the showshops during the current season. Mr. Williams, described by Director Elia Kazan as the finest talent among the playwrights of today, has plays called Orpheus Descending and Sweet Bird of Youth on the docket. Paul Osborn is the author of Maiden Voyage, which concerns the gods on Mount Olympus, and John O'Hara has turned out a drama that bears the title of You Are My Sister.

"We like it," said Producer Richard Myers a few weeks ago, "and we hope to produce it. If the author and the director, Herman Shumlin, can agree on certain treatments without slaughtering each other we will probably go into production." This Mr. Myers, incidentally, is the producing partner of Julius Fleischman, Cincinnati millionaire, who has interests in tin, copper, silver, gold, zinc, real estate, opera and the ballet. If they can just find the plays the Messrs. Myers and Fleischman will have the money for them.

So the show goes on in the New York area that has the all-inclusive name of Broadway, a place and a business and a state of mind in which losses are catastrophic and jack-pots are rare -- but the current fall finds the producers just as hopeful as ever. The general situation in theatretown has been brightened immeasurably as a result of the fine season of 1955-56, a season of such quality that many of the habitually gloomy showmen are now inclined toward rosy predictions.

The musical version of Voltaire's Candide strikes snag number one in an early reading.

Thornton Wilder's The Matchmaker was a rewrite of his earlier Merchant of Yonkers, which was in turn based on an old French farce. Ruth Gordon (above, center, mouth open), "maybe the greatest humorist in the theatre, lifted the play right out of nowhere," in the opinion of Wolcott Gibbs. Below, in Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, Jayne Mansfield, the show's original star, gets a bit more than a rub-down.

Thornton Wilder's The Matchmaker was a rewrite of his earlier Merchant of Yonkers, which was in turn based on an old French farce. Ruth Gordon (above, center, mouth open), "maybe the greatest humorist in the theatre, lifted the play right out of nowhere," in the opinion of Wolcott Gibbs. Below, in Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, Jayne Mansfield, the show's original star, gets a bit more than a rub-down.

Thornton Wilder's The Matchmaker was a rewrite of his earlier Merchant of Yonkers, which was in turn based on an old French farce. Ruth Gordon (above, center, mouth open), "maybe the greatest humorist in the theatre, lifted the play right out of nowhere," in the opinion of Wolcott Gibbs. Below, in Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, Jayne Mansfield, the show's original star, gets a bit more than a rub-down.

Thornton Wilder's The Matchmaker was a rewrite of his earlier Merchant of Yonkers, which was in turn based on an old French farce. Ruth Gordon (above, center, mouth open), "maybe the greatest humorist in the theatre, lifted the play right out of nowhere," in the opinion of Wolcott Gibbs. Below, in Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, Jayne Mansfield, the show's original star, gets a bit more than a rub-down.

A work light glares on a bare stage as O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night has its first reading. Above, Fredric March tries a scene "without the book."

A work light glares on a bare stage as O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night has its first reading. Above, Fredric March tries a scene "without the book."