Exit Smiling

The Broadway season, like the oyster season, is restricted to months with an r in them. With only one more show, a musical, opening this season and with such hits as Hooray for What! and Of Mice and Men already closed, it was plain last week that few producers were running the risk of theatrical ptomaine. But 1937-38 was eupeptic. No really bad play landed on its feet, though several got passing marks almost entirely through star acting: Susan and God because of Gertrude Lawrence, Whiteoaks because of Ethel Barrymore, Once Is Enough because of Ina Claire. Further, it was a season in which, from start to finish, the critics acted as pacesetters: No-play they panned became a hit, and none they cheered turned out a flop.

Of the season's 96 productions, some 50% were flops, however, while 19 shows ran 100 performances or better. The general average of 53.4 performances (as of June 1) creditably topped last season's average of 48.2.

Biggest Broadway news for 1937-38 was:

1) The Mercury Theatre, which first made headlines with Julius Caesar, the season's most exciting stunt, and thereafter stayed continuously on the front page with The Cradle Will Rock, the season's most original form of entertainment; The Shoemakers' Holiday, the season's most rollicking revival; Heartbreak House, the season's most difficult play to revive. Synonymous with the Mercury Theatre was Actor-Director Orson Welles.

2) The Federal Theatre, which has three hits in Manhattan: the Living Newspaper ". . . one third of a nation . . .", a smashing exposure of slum conditions; what might be called the Living Pulp Magazine Haiti which, played in Harlem with all the stops pulled out, is whacking good melodrama; Prologue to Glory, no great shakes as a play, but redeemed by the acting of Stephen Courtleigh as the young Abe Lincoln.

3) The sceneryless stage, which for a while scared stage designers as a nudist epidemic would scare dressmakers. It fully justified itself by making Julius Caesar timeless in its meaning, by giving Our Town the universality of Everytown.

4) A trend toward mysticism, which expressed itself in three smash hits (Our Town, Shadow and Substance, On Borrowed Time) as well as in some lesser fry. But all these plays, warmed by humor or pricked by wit, were far removed from the solemn fudge of the Servant in the House era, made neither God nor Death embarrassing. On Borrowed Time, though pleasant, was very likely the most overrated play of the season. But Our Town (the Pulitzer Prize play), despite a third act which got beyond its depth, squeezed so much honest feeling, poetry and humor into its first two acts as to be, if not technically the season's best play, its most notable event in the theatre. Best play technically: Of Mice and Men, (which won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award).

The season produced no first-rate comedy, and, though its biggest guns were all on the serious side, no important play with social significance. (Of Mice and Men and Golden Boy had social material, but no major social theme.) But social significance ran away with the musical field, providing a tense, pounding strike drama in The Cradle Will Rock, a fresh, spirited revue in Pins and Needles. Best of the straight musicals: Hooray for What!, thanks to the clowning of Ed Wynn, the music of Harold Arlen.

Credit Lines. Playwright-of-the-season was undoubtedly Thornton Wilder, whose Our Town was his first full-length play. Though Broadway's two reigning favorites, Helen Hayes and Katharine Cornell, made no appearance there, the season saw plenty of good acting. Best performance by an actor: Wallace Ford as the tough-but-tender runt in Of Mice and Men; by an actress: Gertrude Lawrence as the phony, luxuriating Buchmanite in Susan and God. Honorable mention: Sir Cedric Hardwicke as the chill, arrogant canon in Shadow and Substance, Phyllis Joyce as the superbly high-handed Lady Utterword in Heartbreak House, Ina Claire as the velvety, purring duchess in Once Is Enough. Outstanding kid performance: seven-year-old Peter Holden as Pud in On Borrowed Time. Sparkling cluster of ingenues: Frances Farmer in Golden Boy, Martha Scott in Our Town, Julie Haydon in Shadow and Substance, Geraldine Fitzgerald in Heartbreak House.

Biggest profits for 1937-38 probably went to the Shuberts for Hooray for What!; worst loss ($125,000) to Laurence Rivers, Inc. for the Tallulah Bankhead stillborn Antony and Cleopatra. Sitting pretty among producers were the Mercury Theatre, with four successes out of four tries, Sam H. Harris and Dwight Deere Wiman, each with two out of two. The season's most notable comeback was Producer Jed Harris, who gave A Doll's House the record run of its 58-year history (141 performances), besides producing Our Town. Season's conspicuous downfall was the Theatre Guild, which, out of seven tries, landed only one near-hit (Amphitryon 38), one respectable revival (The Sea Gull). Faced in midseason with the loss of three of its crack playwrights (TIME, March 21), the Guild, at season's end, planned future affiliation with outside groups like the Mercury.

Hollywood had only a very small finger in this season's Broadway pie. Only important play completely backed by Hollywood was George and Margaret, financed by Warner Brothers, though the cinema rights to the musical I Married An Angel belong to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer because M-G-M owns the cinema rights to the play from which I Married An Angel was made. On the sales end, none of this season's plays fetched anything like last season's Room Service ($255,000), The Women ($200,000). With such hits as Of Mice and Men and Susan arid God still unsold, highest prices this season went to On Borrowed Time (MGM: approximately $80,000), to Golden Boy (Columbia: approximately $75.000).

Survival of the Fittest. At season's end these 1937-38 plays plan to run through the summer: Our Town, On Borrowed Time, Shadow and Substance, Bachelor Born, The Circle, What a Life, Whiteoaks. These musicals: I'd Rather Be Right, Pins and Needles, I Married An Angel. Musical opening May 31: The Two Bouquets.

*Exclusive of productions by the Federal Theatre and the Abbey Theatre Players.

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