The New Season

The upcoming Broadway season, if only a portion of the prospects pan out, promises great things. In the side-of-the-mouth accents of the tradesheet Variety, "B'way legit never had it so good."

Candide & Li'l Abner. Producers, writers and musicians have been working on a whopping list of 34 musicals--at least ten of which will probably see an opening night on Broadway. The list ranges from the operatic Ballad of Baby Doe (TIME, July 16) to a musical adaptation of Voltaire's Candide by Lillian (The Little Foxes) Hellman, Conductor-Composer Leonard Bernstein and Poet Richard Wil bur. There are also such suggestions of enchanting evenings as Ethel Merman in Happy Hunting, with a book by Life With Father's Howard Lindsay-Russel Grouse; Li'l Abner, based on Al Capp's comic strip, with songs by Johnny Mercer; Pay the Piper by George (Damn Yankees, The Pa jama Game) Abbott, based on Eugene O'Neill's Anna Christie. Three other musicals will star such topnotch musicomedy personalities as Nancy Walker, Judy Holliday, Bert Lahr.

Almost 100 comedies and dramas are being prepared for production this season and more than 50 will probably make it. Some of the world's best performers will play in comedies by Moliere and tragedies by Shakespeare when Broadway is visited by two famed repertory companies, the British Old Vic and the Jean-Louis Barrault-Madeleine Renaud company of Paris. For George Bernard Shaw's centennial year there is talk of productions of Major Barbara, The Apple Cart and St. Joan, starring Siobhan McKenna. Eugene O'Neill's posthumous drama A Long Day's Journey Into Night (TIME, Feb. 20) and his Moon for the Misbegotten (TIME, Aug. 4, 1952) will get their long-awaited first Broadway productions.

Orpheus & Romanoff. Patrick Dennis's bestselling novel Auntie Mame will star Rosalind Russell. Samuel (Boy Meets Girl) Spewack will try to reconquer Broadway with Once There Was a Russian. Britain's Peter (The Love of Four Colonels) Ustinov will make his bid with Romanoff and Juliet. Terence Rattigan will offer two comedies that amused London for a couple of seasons, Separate Tables and The Sleeping Prince. Tennessee Williams' newest, Orpheus Descending, will descend on Broadway with Italy's Oscar-winning Anna Magnani.

The first-magnitude stars include Walter Pidgeon, Charles Laughton, Burgess Meredith, Barbara Bel Geddes, Michael Redgrave, Maurice Evans, Claire Bloom, Fredric March, Shelley Winters. Only the season will tell whether the plays and players look as good on the boards as they promise on paper. But with the curtain about to rise on the 1956-57 season, the only thing Broadway seemed to lack was enough theaters to go around for all the shows that producers want to bet on.

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