Broadway Blackout

"The worst season in 20 years," wrote Brooks Atkinson of the New York Times; George Jean Nathan couldn't remember as bad a one in 35. Neither the Pulitzer Committee nor the New York Drama Critics' Circle bothered to make its annual award. Variety announced that of 66 new shows only six were hits. No Broadway season was ever buried with fewer flowers or less oratory than 1941-42.

The war was plainly the chief culprit. It upset playwrights, rattled producers, discouraged audiences. Not a single new show produced after Pearl Harbor was a hit. But (and for this the war wasn't entirely to blame) not a single new show deserved to be a hit. Comedies, farces, fantasies--the theater of entertainment and escape--showed as little merit as the theater of ideas. Big names--John Steinbeck, Maxwell Anderson, George Kaufman, Clifford Odets, Ben Hecht, Marc Connelly, Paul Vincent Carroll, Emlyn Williams--revealed all the ineptitude of nonentities. During the entire season, not one U.S. playwright produced a good original full-length play of any kind. No playwright of whatever nationality came out with a good drama. There was too much luckless trying to read the public's mind, too much flopportunism.

>The season did best with musicals (Let's Face It!, Banjo Eyes, Best Foot Forward, Sons o' Fun) and with revivals (Macbeth, Porgy and Bess, Candida). Thoroughly revived also, after a long, troubled sleep, was vaudeville.

> It did worst with war plays. Of nine that were produced, none had real merit, only The Wookey had any popular appeal.

> It did least with farce. For one bubbling Blithe Spirit, there were a dozen cold, dismal flops.

The season's biggest gold mines were Let's Face It! and Sons o' Fun; its worst cave-in, The Lady Comes Across (a $200,000 musicalamity). Only producers to have had more than one hit were the Shuberts, but Gilbert Miller headed the mourners' bench with three flops. Movie money in general was tight, even though The Moon Is Down (because of its success as a book) went to 20th Century-Fox for a record $300,000, Let's Face It! to Paramount for $225,000.

> Best performance by an actor: Burgess Meredith as the for-once-bearable Marchbanks in Candida.

> Best performance by an actress: Mildred Natwick as the bouncy medium in Blithe Spirit.

> Best cutup: Bobby Clark as blustering, lily-livered Bob Acres in The Rivals.

> Best musicomedy performer: Danny Kaye as the double-talking marvel of Let's Face It!

> Best newcomers: Judith Evelyn, as the harassed, hysterical wife in Angel Street, Avon Long as the brilliantly capering Sportin' Life in Porgy and Bess.

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