Show Business

P: Last week Tobacco Road played in Augusta, Ga., a few miles from the play's locale. To get the price of a gallery seat Tobacco Readers industriously picked beans, Playwright Erskine Caldwell's father, the Rev. Ira Sylvester Caldwell, shepherded them to Augusta for the show.

They applauded loudly, and many saw it twice. For Augusta, it was the first professional play in nearly five years; for most sharecroppers, the first of their lives.

P: Headed for Broadway in an 88-year-old play, Herod and Mariamne, Katharine Cornell ended its run in Washington last week after four weeks on the road. Though she shares honors with Helen Hayes as Broadway's First Lady, Actress Cornell has not acted there in 18 months.

P: In London, Frank Pettingell, leading actor in J. B. Priestley's When We Are Married, was injured in a motor accident.

Overnight, Priestley--who had never acted before--stepped into the part, played a drunken Yorkshire photographer so nimbly that he boomed the show from drowsy success to smash hit. After his first performance Priestley confessed he had not been so nervous in 23 years: "My trouble was I didn't know the lines. You see, I wrote them."

P: For years The Great Nelson has done a balancing act supporting his entire body on two thumbs. Fortnight ago, in Brockton, Mass., he surpassed himself: supported his entire body on one thumb.

P: A big hit on Broadway, Maurice Evans' uncut Hamlet, which runs from 6:30 to 11:20 p. m., is no treat for standees. The night the show acquired its first standees Producer Evans was so elated that he invited all four of them to eat as his guests during the dinner intermission.

P: Seeking publicity for their forthcoming production of that aged melodrama, The Drunkard, four University of Oklahoma boys staggered down the aisle of an Oklahoma City church waving a whiskey bottle, threw a State W. C. T. U. convention into an uproar. Amid screaming and fainting women, police arrived and dragged the drunks off to jail. There, when.it transpired that the whiskey was coffee, the jag a joke, the four students were let off. Said one of them: ''It was the biggest act of my career, and before the most unsympathetic audience."

P: Manhattan's newest columnist, pert Dorothy Kilgallen, who last week took over the Journal and American's "Voice of Broadway," immediately implored producers to ring up their curtains at 9:30 p. m., on the grounds that she is "an eating girl" and, as things stand, goes to the theatre half starved. "Or else," she wound up, "send me sandwiches with my tickets." If her suggestion were adopted, critics on morning newspapers would have only 15 minutes to write their reviews.

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