Noble Entrance, Feeble Exit

Not for a great many years had a Broadway season got off to so brilliant a start: by Christmas close to ten new attractions adorned the Main Stem. But few other new ones adorned it thereafter; the hyphen in 1947-48 was more like a period. And Broadway this spring drooped as noticeably at the box office as it did on the stage. But 1947-48 ranks as one of the better seasons for all that, and nearly as much for the things it tried as for the times it triumphed.

There was very little pattern to its triumphs ; it was not a season when revivals, or musicals, or dramas, or comedies held the limelight or hogged the show. In fact, the great triumphs--the things that few who witnessed them would ever forget--were highly special ones, like Judith Anderson's overwhelming performance in Medea or Jerome Robbins' superb Mack Sennett ballet in High Button Shoes.

Saroyan's Heir. But there were some pretty substantial new plays, true though it was that many of them (Mister Roberts, Command Decision, The Heiress) had previously been books. And there was, at last, what almost everybody regarded as a substantial young playwright: Tennessee Williams, whose Streetcar Named Desire won both the Critics' Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize--a feat achieved only once before, by William Saroyan's The Time of Your Life in 1940.

Two loudly trumpeted musicals, Allegro and Inside U.S.A., reached Broadway with $500,000 or more already in the till; but far more modest musicals like Make Mine Manhattan and Angel in the Wings proved much better fun. The classics provided some rewarding evenings (Medea, Antony and Cleopatra, The Alchemist) and there was enough Shaw for a minor festival.

Hits & Pieces. Experiment made more noise than news: the Experimental Theatre gave few signs of being experimental and fewer still of being theater. And Broadway had a more cosmopolitan look than at any time since the '303 -- welcoming (not always too warmly) troupes and troupers from England, Eire, Palestine, France.

P: Biggest box office during 1947-48: 1945-46's Annie Get Your Gun, with Ethel Merman.

P: Most in the red: Hold It! ($300,000 and still shelling out).

Hollywood was still spending fancy money, but taking longer & longer about it. Harvey finally went to Universal-International in a record sale -- a million dollars plus percentages; Born Yesterday to Columbia for a million flat; Annie Get Your Gun to M-G-M for $650,000. But only one of 1947-48's plays went for anything worth noting: Command Decision to M-G-M for a $100,000 down payment, a $300,000 top.

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