Finish Line

Not in a generation had a Broadway season counted up to so few shows. There were only 52 during 1949-50. The downpour of financial backing available for wartime producing had been cut by production costs to a light drizzle. As almost all shows found it harder to get to Broadway, so the doubtful ones found it harder to linger there until the public could judge them. But it was not wholly a matter for lamentation; rare this season were those exhibits of unutterable drivel that had once turned up every week.

The Good Points. Unhappily, 1949-50 did not make up in brilliance for what it lacked in bulk. The most that could be said was that it had its good points and incidental graces and one or two peak moments. However controversial in theme, T. S. Eliot's The Cocktail Party offered the best new stage writing in years. And though Carson McCullers' The Member of the Wedding (winner of the Critics' Award) might have trouble proving itself a play, it too could take pride in much of its writing. Better still, both these very individual works, like such recent others as A Streetcar Named Desire, Death of a Salesman and The Madwoman of Chaillot, became genuine box-office hits.

In a season whose musicomedies were resolutely undistinguished, musical drama --the one new form to establish itself on Broadway--strengthened its hold. Gian-Carlo Menotti's smash hit The Consul (along with The Cocktail Party] had every cocktail party in Manhattan buzzing. Marc Blitzstein's Regina died at the boxoffice, but it was very much alive on the stage.

The Glaring Lack. What hobbled the season was less a lack of aspiration than (as the New York Times's Critic Brooks Atkinson and others noted) a glaring lack of creativeness. Broadway swam with revivals (Shakespeare, Shaw, Strindberg Peter Pan), with books made into plays (The Member of the Wedding, The Innocents, The Happy Time, Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep) with plays and books made into musicals (Regina, Lost in the Stars, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes'). Making its chairs out of sofas rather than building them outright, Broadway still scorned the idea that the play's the thing and whooped up the production.

Box-office activity topped 1948-49 and was reasonably good. In its second year, South Pacific remained the biggest--in fact the alltime biggest--hit on Broadway. Hollywood, having sat with folded hands the season before, dug down into its jeans for more than $1,000,000, paying $350,000 plus a percentage for A Streetcar Named Desire, $285,000 plus a percentage for Detective Story. Without much to look back on in 1949-50, Broadway could at least look forward to being in business in 1950-51.

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