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Not for a long while had Broadway had a more prosperous or pleasing season. At times, during 1955-56, even the more contained critics chose their words like poets --or like pressagents. Where, all too often in years gone by, the jejune was bustin' out all over, this season had a great deal of flavor, and a fair amount of body as well. Even so late as April, when playwriting usually sports its lightest-weight and most ill-fitting clothes, plays still looked neat or showed substance.

AAA to EEE. Merit, on Broadway, came in most sizes and shapes. In My Fair Lady, music had charms to please the most civilized breast; gilding Pygmalion, My Fair Lady made a dazzling Mayfair lady of Shaw's guttersnipe. The season's comedies had everything from the faint fine laughter of the eyes to sheer guffawing rock and roll. There was rewarding drama as well as melodrama, and in The Diary of Anne Frank, which won seven awards (including the Pulitzer and Critics' Circle), sound sentiment.

Most works with any real distinction possessed foreign blood. The season's most creative new play was British Writer Enid Bagnold's witty, elegantly savage The Chalk Garden. Even more finely tempered was Tiger at the Gates, Jean Giraudoux's humanely ironic lament for the Trojan and all subsequent wars. Audiences might argue whether Samuel Beckett's puzzling, plotless Waiting for Godot was profound art or a mere philosophic quiz show; less arguable was the neatness of its writing, the desolation of its mood. In Lillian Hellman's sharp adaptation, Jean Anouilh's The Lark proved a lively stage piece; under Tyrone Guthrie's vivid direction, Marlowe's Tamburlaine the Great, if still no play, was rich in theater, spectacle, rhetoric.

Made in U.S.A. Native playwriting was solid too, but at a less lustrous level and in less creative guise. Much, instead of being directly created for the stage, was made over from something else, whether in such clear successes as The Diary of Anne Frank, No Time for Sergeants and The Ponder Heart, or such interesting failures as Mister Johnson and The Young and Beautiful. At straight playwriting, Arthur Miller came closest to real achievement with A View from the Bridge, but he let a longing for Greek tragedy blur the play's kinship with primitivist drama.

The honor roll for acting was almost tiresomely long: beyond established names like Bert Lahr, Ruth Gordon, Rex Harrison, Joseph Schildkraut, Shirley Booth, there were young or foreign ones like Julie Andrews, Andy Griffith, Earle Hyman, Siobhan McKenna. It was the season when, thanks to Comedienne Nancy Walker, Noel Coward's generation-old Fallen Angels was restored to life without having previously ever lived, when Orson Welles played King Lear in a wheelchair, and when Susan Strasberg, in the title role of Anne Frank, was raised to stardom at 17.

The season's most significant trend could be described in a word as upward. But that perforce meant outward as well, whether geographically as off-Broadway expanded, or thematically as the offbeat gained ground. Off-Broadway, New York's real new home for revivals, did acceptably or better with Shakespeare, Chekhov, Pirandello, Shaw; staged O'Neill's four-and-three-quarters-hour The Iceman Cometh well, Turgenev's seldom-seen A Month in the Country charmingly. And though, on Broadway, the inept and the tinny still lingered, and formula still showed plenty of fight, there was a perceptibly greater willingness to take a chance. Thus even certain flops represented not just error, but trial and error; revealed not just the same old stage sins of the fathers, but a touch of original sin.

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