Annual Report

No monuments will be erected to the Broadway season of 1939-40. In solid achievement, it proved the weakest in years. It lacked also exciting experiment--had nothing to compare with the Sceneryless Stage, a one-act Julius Caesar, Pins and Needles, Hellzapoppin, The Swing Mikado. Few, even, of its many failures were honorable. It had only one distinction: its jokes were good. The Man Who Came to Dinner, Life with Father, The Male Animal, Morning's at Seven and two or three musical shows made it an excellent season for comedy.

On the serious side, it had important names but no more. Maxwell Anderson's Key Largo, Sidney Kingsley's The World We Make, Paul Vincent Carroll's Kindred were pretentious; Clifford Odets' Night Music and Elmer Rice's Two on an Island were Boy-Meets-Girl potboilers. Hemingway's The Fifth Column was interesting for more than a title which has since become part of the language; but by the time Benjamin Glazer finished rewriting it, much of the play's realistic force was obscured by romantic nonsense. Best of a bad lot was Robert Sherwood's "There Shall Be No Night," which owed as much to the audience's apprehensiveness as to Sherwood's art, but was a frequently eloquent piece of stage journalism.

At season's end, only 15 shows had run over 100 performances or more, compared to 22 at last season's close. Some of the season's tops:

> Best comedy: Kaufman & Hart's hilarious The Man Who Came to Dinner.

> Best musicomedy: Cole Porter's boisterous, bawdy Du Barry Was a Lady.

> Best melodrama: the gripping, British-born Ladies in Retirement.

> Best omelet-without-eggs: The Male Animal, which managed to be a lot of fun without being a play.

> Best actress: Sara Allgood, as ill-used, valiant-hearted Juno in the revival of Sean O'Casey's Juno and the Paycock.

> Best actor: Barry Fitzgerald as the strutting, shiftless Paycock of the same play.

> Best character-acting: Estelle Winwood as one of the loony sisters in Ladies in Retirement.

> Best animal: Sharkey, the seal whose bark is better than his bite in Higher and Higher.

> Best ham: John Barrymore as the incorrigible ad-libertine in My Dear Children.

> Most overrated play: Saroyan's pleasantly boozy but unimportant prizewinner, The Time of Your Life (185 performances).

> Most underrated play: Paul Osborn's casual, but amusing and lifelike Morning's at Seven (44 performances).

> Biggest moneymakers: (musical) Du Barry Was a Lady and Too Many Girls; (straight) The Man Who Came to Dinner and Life With Father, about neck & neck.

> Biggest disappointment: Vivien Leigh & Laurence Olivier's Romeo and Juliet.

> Worst downfall: the once exciting Group Theatre which, as a result of a disastrous season, may disband.

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