New Season on Broadway

This week, with a new season about to begin, there were only 13 shows in Broadway's 30 playhouses, and all but one (Mike Todd's bosomy, bumptious Peep Show) were holdover hits from past seasons. During the summer, television networks had gobbled up three more legitimate theaters (making 16 to date). Production costs were skyrocket-high. Producers bemoaned the lack of new playwrights, and looked in vain for the open-handed angels of only a few years ago.

40 into 17. But Broadway still had high hopes for 1950-51. The war, always a boost to show business, and a current fad for theater parties were expected to help. The 14,000-member Show-of-the-Month Club, which last year sold over $600,000 worth of tickets, looked for a bigger enrollment this year.

Broadway seemed determined to start the season off in high gear. Opening month last year saw only one production, but September 1950 will have five: James Bridie's long-run London hit Daphne Laureola, Louis Verneuil's Affairs of State with Celeste Holm, Owen Crump's Southern Exposure, Lesley Storm's Black Chiffon, another London import, and Drama Critic (The New Yorker) Wolcott Gibbs's Season in the Sun.

By the end of December, 40-odd projected productions, many of them by practised hands, will have scrambled for berths in Broadway's 17 unoccupied theaters. As usual, playgoers can look forward to a full schedule of musicals : Lindsay & Grouse's Call Me Madam, boasting Ethel Merman, an Irving Berlin score, and a $700,000 advance sale; Cole Porter's Out of This World; Benjamin Britten's novelty musical Let's Make an Opera. For mid-fall production, Broadway will import British Dramatist Christopher Fry's The Lady's Not for Burning (with John Gielgud) and Aldous Huxley's The Giaconda Smile.

Rosy Prospects. Playwright Arthur (Death of a Salesman) Miller is working on an adaptation of Ibsen's An Enemy of the People, and the Theatre Guild is dickering for William Inge's Front Porch. Producers Rodgers & Hammerstein have scheduled Novelist John Steinbeck's Burning Bright, and Producer Cheryl Crawford has Tennessee (A Streetcar Named Desire) Williams' The Rose Tattoo on her schedule. By the time the season is half over, Broadway will probably be seeing Hollywood's Louis Calhern (in King Lear) and Olivia de Havilland (in Romeo and Juliet), besides such stage faithfuls as Dame Edith Evans, Flora Robson, Jessica Tandy, Lilli Palmer, and possibly Tallulah Bankhead.

For showmen who could stop worrying long enough about Broadway's chronic money problems and the growing threat of TV, prospects looked rosier than they had in years.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.